“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” –Mark Twain
The socio-political cognitive dissonance that awaits half the nation (and it’s still fair to ask which half) is going to send some folks into years of therapy. This essay, as you will see, is predisposed to one narrative. The human mind cannot entertain both.
In fact the reset for many will arrive in begrudging half-measures. The real crazies (not us!) will grumble that the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy finally prevailed on poor Hillary. Psychologically, that will be about the best they can do. Patience, not partisan recriminations will be the wisest societal response.
I have an 83-year-old mother who will not walk on grass if the authorities have placed a sign on the approach to City Hall. She’s far from stupid and yet she has been socialized into an unwavering belief that what appears on the TV news is an accurate rendition of what transpired in the world that day. Why would it be otherwise?
Morbid as it may sound, I would like her Christian naiveté to depart the planet untrammeled before her go-to source, CNN, has little choice but to report on the most depraved aspects of what so many of us have already come to accept of the recently defeated and soon-to-be exposed Democratic Party/Globalist alliance.
There may not be blood, but there will be psychological carnage which can create equally grievous wounds.
Already, microcosmic civil wars are being waged across America’s dining-room tables. It seems a new nation is being conceptually birthed one car pool and barbershop at a time. For better or worse, the ‘resurgent nationalist narrative’ is going mid-speed viral, which may be the appropriate velocity for social cogitation.
Perhaps the nation is better left to ingest seedy revelations in bite-sized increments and at the cellular level –neighbor counseling neighbor– until a New Consensus can construct itself from the bottom-up, couched as a People’s directive for a new paradigm of leadership.
For the moment I’m having limited success reaching consensus with many in my social and family circles on even the most rudimentary fact patterns, as I know many others are too. I think most Trump supporters have endured some level of social ostracism, even if it amounts to little more than de-friending on social networks. I know I have.
Red Pill/Blue Pill? I prefer Red Shift/Blue Abyss. But there I go betraying my bias again.
If you adhere to the darkest reaches of the Clinton/Globalist rabbit holes, then the Full Arc of Deception takes on a Goebbels-esque Bigness that, by its very ambition, resists ready comprehension. Mass incredulity is a potent tactic of concealment. These people have (allegedly) drifted so far from the norms of human behavior that their aberrance serves as its own sinister camouflage.
Our humanity implores us to deny the worst of what we hear, especially as it relates to children. I for one will be ecstatic if, in a surfeit of investigatory zeal, we’ve overinferred an inky blackness where there was only mere darkness. But like many of you, I’ve read too many bone-chilling accounts for too long.
I particularly want to acknowledge the Conservative Treehouse site. The analytical homework that has gone on there (mapping the anatomy of an aborted soft coup on the fledgling Trump Administration) is breathtaking. Kudos to the folks behind all that.
Due to the mass cognitive dislocation that may loom just around the corner, I believe people will benefit from graspable handles into this story, a human-interest breadcrumb trail through the Dark Forest.
For, reminiscent of Sheldon Wolin’s inverted totalitarianism, the full-spectrum ambitions of the corruption (Wolin the atheist often called the underlying dynamic totalism; a Christian, I prefer the Antichrist Spirit) lend to the proceedings a disembodied, ubiquitous, colorless and odorless quality. Like Rosemary’s Baby, it can feel like everyone, every institution, is in the coven. The plot cries out for a redemptive figure.
Enter NSA Director, Admiral Mike Rogers.
The Conservative Treehouse largely fashioned the Rogers narrative, or at least I encountered it there first in its most comprehensive form. I simply attempted to propagate it and furnish other relevant insights in the video (below) to spread the gospel within my own circle.
Rogers (as good a candidate for QAnon as any) offers a White Hat decent people will relate to. The Admiral may be just the narrative float we need to keep our heads above the cesspit. I know I’m glad to have found him.
The other advantage of the Rogers Handle is that, depicted correctly, it neatly sidesteps the elephant in the psych ward, Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). TDS is a real pathology encountered in the more afflicted Trump-haters. Sample verbal tics include:
It’s raining today. Damn that Trump!
California is engulfed in flames –Ooh I could strangle Trump!
My cat got hit by a car –Where’s that scoundrel Trump?!
In fact, The Chicago Manual of Style recently deemed our Rorschach President a new hybridized form of punctuation –something between a period and an exclamation mark. This means all petulant American gripes and moans (of which there are many) can now end in Trump without running afoul of grammatical syntax.
Years ago, my son asked me for an example of an ad hominem fallacy. My sage example? “Charles Manson looks out the window and says ‘It’s raining.’ A guy on the other side of the room says, ‘It can’t possibly be raining. You’re mass murderer Charles Manson.'” Some guys are so odious they can even bend weather patterns. That’s Charlie. That’s Trump.
As many on the American Left would have it, like an orange-dyed sun, the Mass That Is Trump has become the space-curving, universal butt of all earthly afflictions. You encounter this ‘mode of argument’ a dozen times every day in American social and mainstream media.
And yet, the carpet-bombing Trump demonization campaign keeps alchemizing into a Trump deification project. Trump-haters hate every minute of their hate-filled servitude. Except they can’t stop. As Joan Jett almost once said: I hate myself for compulsing you!
Then there are the canaries in the Trump mine-shaft, pre-haters, like the students who detested the State of the Union Address pre-address. Now that’s hate in all its dumb and apriori glory! No combination of words can please the intellectually incapacitated.
There’s a supernatural dimension to all of this too. Have you noticed? Every arrow fired at Trump kills the archer: Comey, Bannon, Priebus, little ole Kathy Griffin. God has a penchant for enlisting the most contrary figures.
Here’s the video:
Americans of all stripes need to get over their Trump pet peeves because we have bigger Constitutional fish to fry. The egregious and fascistic abuses routinely practiced by the prior regime –both to preserve Clinton’s candidacy and then later, in phase two, to attempt a palace coup– need not avail the Trump name.
Would you interrogate or blame a victim for being a compulsory party to a crime? Of course not! Then leave Trump out of it. Do your best Tom Jefferson (sans slaves) and keep to the rarefied heights of Constitutional rectitude. (Please watch the video to get a keener sense of the frightening FISA 702 abuses and the Deep State/Obama Administration collusion that sought to usurp the People’s Choice. Trump is blessedly incidental to the core abuses.)
Are we being punked again?
I think Trump the Negotiator is too politically aware –and too covetous of his populist street cred– to bargain away Guantanamo for these treasonous miscreants. In the final analysis though, deal-makers are driven by pragmatism and cost-benefit. And who put the sloth in Sessions’ shoes? Will the System, even with a comparatively exogenous Trump at the helm, rush in to save itself? It’s quite possible. A slapped-together WW3 would certainly be one ‘corrective’.
What I’m suggesting, with some trepidation, is that a Grand Bargain may yet emerge from the backrooms of power. Boy, it would have to be a killer quid pro quo. The populist in me could never swallow such a betrayal –and make no mistake, it would be a betrayal.
I’ve focused mostly here on the socio-political strains of cognitive dissonance. Dr. Jerome Corsi and QAnon’s direst warnings have gone largely unaddressed. Let us pray they’re guilty of the imaginative overshoot I described above.
For at the highest registers, dissonance –cognitive or otherwise– can overwhelm the consonant elements its seeks to protect, leaving the harmonic vessel (in this case the soul) little recourse but to shatter. Just how evil are the icons and institutions that surround us? Tune in with trepidation.
Full-Spectrum Domino 