I’m of the opinion that you need to expose yourself to ideas you don’t agree with so you build up the mental antibodies necessary to be self-confident in what you believe in. And, yet, here I am being irritated by some of the comments I’ve heard on the “All-In” podcast.
I have nothing against any of the guys on the show and it is interesting and informative. It’s just the more I think about it, the more angry I get at how a number of the participants have thrown their lot in with MAGA. They should know better, and, yet, they apparently want Trump back because they believe in the fascist “leadership principle.”
It’s amazing to me to hear intelligent, well educated people advocate for an orange ding-dong like Trump. What the what? I guess money can’t buy you taste. But it doesn’t stop there.
They also believe the MAGA New Right has the right to spread disinformation on everything from COVID19 to Trump numerous and well documented crimes. Again, I just don’t get it. And they’re so self-assured and smug about supporting fascism.
They cherry pick the data points of the Trump Era that fit their needs, totally ignoring what a massive clusterfuck it was otherwise. It’s staggering how it’s possible any self-aware person could willfully buy into such bullshit.
There is no excuse for supporting MAGA for any reason. But I guess if you want an autocratic fascist state where you, as a billionaire, get to play the role of American oligarch, then the idea that tyranny will have descended across the land of the free is a lulz.
As I’ve written before, the American electoral system hides a pretty shocking fact about what’s going on right now. If we had, say, a parliamentary system like the Weimar Republic, it would be very clear that we are in the twilight of our barely functioning democracy.
Instead of two parties, we have the fascist Republican Party and the center-Left alliance of minor parties that fall under the rubric of the Democratic Party. The fascist Republican Party is seething with rage and once they inevitable get power again, they’re unlikely to ever peacefully relinquish it.
There won’t be any sort of a civil war, but rather the fascists will quickly consolidate power. I estimate at least a million center-Left people will flee the the United States starting in late 2024 when it becomes clear that the fascists are going to seize power once an for all. There will be a real counter-revolution in the United States that will see a wide range of very unpopular fascist policies become law. NATO will be destroyed. The United States will form some sort of alliance with the autocrats of Russia, Hungary and Turkey.
Our coming Autocrat?
And that will be that.
That will be the “new normal” for the rest of my life. In fact, I’m probably spend the rest of my life trying to avid being round up by America’s Putin (which ever Republican ends up winning that prize) and maybe I’ll just end up with an ICE bullet in the back of my head when they finally catch up with me.
From everything I see in the United States, such a dystopian hellscape is a pretty safe bet.
What’s interesting is, I talk to my far more conservative relatives and all they talk about is how they thing the “woke cancel culture mob” is going to figure out essentially same thing to THEM. For my Traditionalist relatives, the idea of having their lives ruined “just for being conservative” is something that continues to be at the forefront of their minds. That’s all they talk about.
And that brings up another interesting issue — relative to their echo chamber, they’ve been scared into thinking it’s the center-Left, not the center-Right that will turn the United States into an autocracy. No amount of me talking about the difference between soft power and hard power will change their minds. They no longer believe in democracy and they crave a situation where Democrats can never hold power in any meaningful way.
They believe that only then will they no longer have to go to the sensitive training forced upon them by their “woke” corporate overlords. What’s worse, everything is very muddled in the United States at the moment. The center-Left does it self no favors by fixating on some really, really unpopular ideas ranging from “Defund The Police ” to, yes, extreme trans right. I like to think I’m pretty empathic to trans rights, but I also know that there’s a reason why the Republican Party won’t shut the fuck up about the dangers of that very same thing — it plays really well with Traditionalist conservatives who otherwise are queasy about elements of MAGA.
The United States is a lot like the Titanic just after the iceburg hit. We all know something has gone wrong, but not everyone realizes the ship is going to sink. So, you have a lot very, very clueless Blue Check liberals who think the system still works or that somehow Trump will magically be held accountable for all his many, many crimes.
And, like I said, we all know Blue Check liberals are cowards who will bounce from the United States once it’s clear that all their earnest, angry Twitter threads failed to stop the rise of autocratic America.
Things are very dark in the United States, and we’re going to lurch even closer to a true Russian-style autocracy in January 2023 when the fascist Republican Party takes control again. Republicans will then brazenly steal the 2024 election, even though they probably don’t even have to and that’s it — American autocracy.
We’re fucked. Totally and completely. There’s no going back. When ever election a democracy has is existential, then you’re not even a democracy anymore, you’re an anocracy.
I will be flabbergasted if we have a civil war. The center-Left just doesn’t have it in it to risk their lives and careers to challenge the fascist Republican Party anywhere by Twitter.
To anyone paying attention to American politics, it’s difficult not to be overwhelmed with a sense of impending doom, of dread — The Undertoad. The Republican Party no longer believes in democracy — in fact, won’t shut up about this fact — and because of macro trends they are ascendant.
So, all things being equal, Republicans will, starting January 2023 begin the process of extinguishing American what’s left of American democracy once and for all. The Republican Party has radicalized to the point that even though they probably would win the 2024 without cheating, they will do so anyway.
Once Trump (or whomever) becomes president in 2025, the final transformation of the United States into a Russian-style white Christian ethno state will begin. And I personally know a number of people who will be quite happy that this is happening — until, of course, someone they’re related to — namely ME — crosses our new autocratic regime and they have to figure out how to get me out of a Trump branded re-education camp.
It will all happen gradually, too. And that, in a sense, is why autocracy is so insidious. Most of the people who are screaming at the top of their lungs for an autocracy don’t even realize what they’re doing — all they know is they’re personally afraid of being canceled by the “woke mob” and if that means the end of American democracy, so be it. “The United States isn’t a democracy, it’s a republic. Are you going to question the wisdom of the Founding Fathers?” they say.
And when we’re finally an autocracy, they will sit back smugly that the evil woke mob is finally vanquished and they never have to worry about Democrats ever holding important offices again. They will think this until, as I mentioned, someone they love runs afoul of the autocrat. Then they will sit up and take notice because they’re fucking hypocrites.
But as I keep saying, there are macro political trends coming to a head between now and Certification Day 2025 that we just can’t stop. It would have to take something truly astonishing for us not to face the existential choice of civil war or autocracy. It’s happened once already — the pandemic — so, I suppose it’s possible it could happen again.
This brings up the idea of a potential civil war. At the moment, I think we’re going to slip peacefully into autocracy and that will be that. Nothing will change at first, but mysteriously we’ll all wake up 20 years from now and somehow Ron DeSantis is still POTUS. A mass migration of center-Left people will have occured. The United States will be out of NATO and aligned with Russia and the Constitution will have been changed in accordance with an “American First” world view.
Back to civil war. While I struggle with the idea of a civil war, I also know it’s at least possible. The key metric we have to keep any eye on is how bad things get when Republicans take control of Congress. If they are as bad as I fear — repeated impeachments of both Biden and Harris, for instance, then the prospect of a civil war increases significantly.
But any Second American Civil War would be one of those things that happen for immediate tactical reasons that I can’t game out. A lot depends on the specific circumstances, the specific sequence of events between Election Day 2024 and Certification Day 2025.
If Republicans steal the 2024 election in such a brazen manner because they just don’t fucking care anymore, there is a real chance that a number of major Blue State governors will hold some sort of emergency summit to decide how they’re going to react. If California decides to join forces with New York, Illinois and Massachusetts to leave the Union — or to simply deny that Trump (or whomever) won the election, then we’ll have a civil war.
But I have to stress again that a civil war would happen for reasons that I can’t predict. A lot of personalities and touch choices would be involved in ways that I can’t predict years in advance. Yet, of course, there is a real risk that things will break in such a way that a civil war — based on the state level — will break out and the United States bombs itself into the Stone Age using WMD.
Yet, as I keep saying, all signs point to us slipping peacefully into autocracy. But only time will tell.
I’m going to assume that if WW3 actually does break out that humanity, rather than completely destroy itself, might do a “Little Death” of a limited nuclear exchange. Even that would be one of the more bleak scenarios in such a situation, but it’s something to work with.
The most obvious scenario of a limited nuclear exchange happening is something like this — an Axis is formed between Russia and China at some point in the future. Then the DPRK and Iran join in and we’re going to the show. It’s the DPRK who has the means, motive and opportunity to strike the USA in such a context that would cause us to suffer the effects of H-Bombs being detonated over few major American cities.
If such a horrific thing happened, then that would definitely mark the end of the “Woke Agenda,” let me tell you. When you have no lights, no Internet and a food supply that’s running low, the least of your concerns would the pronouns you use.
Just the idea that a “city killer” would be use on a few major American cities by the DPRK is enough to make you gulp. Where things get tricky is how the US would respond to such a tragedy. Our kneejerk reaction would be to drop H-bombs on all of the DPRK, but, really, they just have their capital and even that is really close to the Chinese border. So, I assume the US would drop a H-bomb on Pyongyang and use tactical nukes on the rest of that country’s major targets.
But I think we can not really process how life in the United States would change on a practical basis if, say, NYC, LA and Washington D.C. were vaporized by DPRK H-bombs. Everything would change. Nothing would ever be the same. And, on a geopolitical basis, Canada sure would start to look enticing to America as a way to get a second chance.
Anyway, I hope we never have to thinking about any of this in the real world. I just like running scenarios.
I saw something rather alarming on Twitter today –apparently, there is a growing belief that the Belarusians are going to attack Ukraine in the west. This is a “not great, Bob” moment because one might make the assumption that such an attack would be directed against the city of Lviv.
What the what?
Add to this that such an attack would hug the border between Ukraine and NATO, holy shit, it makes you think that Putin through his Bealrusian proxies really is in his fuck around and find out phase of the Russo-Ukrainian Winter War. (Which, if it last much longer, I’m going to have to get rid of the “winter” part of its designation.)
It makes you wonder. Is it possible WW3 has started and we just don’t know it yet? Does Putin want a direct war with NATO? Such an idea, on paper, makes absolutely no sense. In fact, it only makes any sense in the context of Russia forming some sort of Axis with China, the DPRK and Iran.
Otherwise, what the what?
We’re reaching a point where we’re sort of in a make or break moment in recent modern world history. Either Putin escalates in a rather dramatic fashion and we see the end of the WW2 liberal order and something akin to WW3, or we punt the structural problems of the modern geopolitical world down the road until the United States answers its autocracy or civil war question in the 2024 – 2025 timeframe.
Thankfully — I guess — we’re probably going to get our answer as to what’s going to happen next with a matter of days or weeks. Things are too unstable. Either Putin loses, or in a desperate effort to win he destroys everything.
After decades of being half-away awake, history is now wide awake and ready to boogie. As part of that suddenly being awake, we face the prospect of the Russians and the Chinese making common cause against Pax Americana. This new Axis might also, along the way recruit Iran and the DPRK.
For the moment, this is rather fanciful.
China has a vested interest — for the time being — in Pax Americana existing so it can slowly rise peacefully within its context. The Chinese are very smart. They know they’re not quite ready to strike in a big away against, say Taiwan, so, lulz, let the Americans have a circle jerk over cancel culture without any major regional war in Asia to worry about.
And, yet, the case could be made that China might see what’s going on between Russia and Ukraine and think NOW is the time to strike. The United States is historically weakened by internal division and the careening existential choice of autocracy or civil war in the 2024 – 2025 time frame.
It’s possible that at some point in the near future all of us will be surprised when there’s a geopolitical tet-a-tet between Putin and Xi and the entire world’s post-WW2 liberal order collapses. China will send Russia arms for its war against Ukraine and Russia will sell China oil. Meanwhile, Xi could lean on the DPRK to attack the South Koreans as some sort of geopolitical distraction for the Americans so China can attack Taiwan.
The Iranians attack Israel and or Iraq to get in on the fun.
Remember, there are no assurances the Good Guys — us — would win such a new series of regional wars, or something that the press would call WW3. It could be that the United States either becomes a MAGA Fortress America or has a civil war and, as such, a new Age of Autocracies is established.
Or, it’s possible that a few billion people during a WW3 for various reasons and when we come out the other side with something akin to United Earth. The process of getting to that point would suck royally, but in the end humanity might find the wherewithal to save itself from itself.
I’ve always thought Joe Rogan was something of a grifter when it came to giving otherwise alienated men something to latch onto. Just because you’re earnest in your masculinity, doesn’t excuse you if you show signs of misogyny, racism or fascism.
But here we are, Rogan is hugely popular in large because a lot of men are struggling to adapt to this strange new world we live in where many “woke” people think that, by definition, being male is bad. Slay the patriarchy and all that.
Then there is Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine. He gives me hope as a man because he doesn’t have any gimmick like Joe Rogan. He’s just a dude doing traditional dude stuff in a traditional dude manner. So, it makes me wonder what would happen if Rogan in all of his earnest masculinity were to interview Zelenskyy.
I think in the end, Rogan would be a puppy dog to Zelenskyy. I say this because Rogan doesn’t have the weight that Zelenskyy has and he’s always angling in to come across as reasonable, even he’s interviewing a fucking bonkers fascist. As such, Rogan frames his conversations in a way that grades people who are demonstrably bad so they they seem just misunderstood.
There is a reason why Rogan is a alt-right, New Right, MAGA gateway drug. He has a tendency to want it both ways — he wants to have power and yet when it gets called on some dumb thing he says, he does a Jon Stewart and says, ‘Why are you listening to me in the first place?”
Anyway, it would definitely be illuminative for Rogan to interview Zelenskyy. Hopefully the war will be over soon so that can happen.
I’m going to shut up about this very soon, but occasionally it takes a few days for one of my ideas to work itself out of my mind. Anyway, the problem with anything like a “New Masculinity” book is because of the woke media narrative we live with, any book that addresses traditional male gender roles in a positive way will be attacked and derided.
The freaky weirdos have won, if you will. (Wink.)
Now, some context. I only even talk about this in this way because I’m growing more and more alarmed by the rise of the fascist MAGA New Right in the United States. One way to slow down — but not stop — the existential choice of fascist autocracy or civil war in the general 2024 – 2025 timeframe is to give one of core elements of the MAGA New Right, alienated Traditionalists men, something to embrace.
In other words, anything to do with traditional male gender roles is a fucking clusterfuck of different groups feeling they have the right to control what that even means. Or, put another way, if someone were to articulate a New Masculinity, then maybe you could walk all Joe Rogan fans off the cliff they’re on where they’re one step away from embracing fascism.
Rather than addressing the issue head on, I think I would hide the notion of New Masculinity in a leadership book. In the male mind, leadership is equated with a traditional male concept. (Even though this is obviously wrong — women make great leaders.)
But the audience for this book would be a college educated Rogan fan. You take something they like — Rogan’s earnest masculinity — and instead of that being a gateway drug into fascism, you give them the option of framing modern masculinity — and leadership — in the context of people like Washington, Lincoln, TR, FDR, Churchill and Zelensky.
So, in a sense, using subtext, you tell these professional men — who should know better about being MAGA New Right -that it’s ok to be a Traditional male in the modern, woke era. You use Zelensky as an avatar, a totem for modern male leadership.
Anyway. Absolutely no one listens to me. And I’m sure if they listened to me with this suggestion I’ll be canceled.
According to the current media narrative, using traditional male concepts as part of traditional male behavior is something to disparage. I’m very empathetic to the crux of this argument.
Zelenskyy
And, yet, just like the slogan “defund the police” is really more about “demilitarizing the police,” so, too, is “slay the patriarchy” really more about the male dominating world being forced to accept the equality of women on a basic level than destroying the world of men in its entirety. (At least, I hope so, for my own sake. Yikes.)
But both slogans are easily corrupted by the MAGA New Right as a bludgeon against a very crucial element of any democracy’s body politic — conservative Traditionalist men.
With this in mind, the conventional wisdom among Blue Check thought leaders in the West at the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian Winter War was that Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, would fold and run away from Kyiv to a more secure location like Lviv in the western part of the country.
But this did not happen.
Instead, Zelenskyy did a very traditional male leader thing — he stood and fought.
That Zelenskyy would do something so basic, so human, so traditional, so masculine without the benefit of a flipping the script in any way came across as something of a shock to Western observers. Zelenskyy was just a traditional male doing traditional things in a traditional way. There was nothing particularly innovative about his leadership style other than it existed and he as just a regular guy doing leading his people in a time of crisis.
This definitely goes against the woke narrative where the only way we can accept leadership is if there is some spicy twist to things. Zelenskyy is not transgendered, nor does he quibble about his pronouns (as far as I know.) He’s just a dude.
So, I propose some discourse over the possibility of what I call New Masculinity. This would be an acceptance that we can both validate and update traditional male concepts without going out of our way to alinate Traditionalist men who are so enraged by the woke agenda that they turn to nothing short of fascism — the MAGA New Right.
It seems to me that there is a possibility that the entire Western world is careening towards a moment when the type of male leadership that Zelenskyy has displayed will be desperately needed. It does not take a soothsayer to notice how unstable the United States is growing and the high risk of a “Great Reset” or “Fourth Turning” around the 2024 – 2025 timeframe.
Maybe we could use Zelenskyy as something of an avatar, a totem that Traditionalists men could imbue with their own, non-woke narrative. I have my doubts that this Hail Mary plot to take the steam out of the misogynistic MAGA New Right will work. But it is something to at least discuss.
The reason I’m doubtful is what I’m proposing is nuanced and subtle. In the extreme polarization of Blue and Red that America currently exists in, the moment Traditionalists adopted my plan, Woke culture would freak the fuck out. Woke people would make fun of the New Masculinity and deride it for not being attune enough to the needs of the modern world. Slay the patriarchy, and all that, don’t you know.
But the New Masculinity of Zelenskyy does produce results. It seems as though Zelenskyy may soon be mentioned in the same breath as Lincoln, FDR and Churchill. He is doing what needs to be done to save his nation from tyranny.
The truly surreal element of all of this is, of course, that because the MAGA New Right is so beholden to the dream of a Russian-style autocratic white Christian ethno state for America, they are wilfully oblivious to the benefits of adopting Zelenskyy as their own.
As I said, I doubt anything will come of this. And if it does, it will probably be corrupted for selfish reasons so it seen as nothing more than the 90s Men’s Movement with a different name or, even worse, some variation of the freaky weirdo Incel movement. But, again, Zelenskyy’s bravery in the face of adversity at least opens the door to some discourse on how he might be an icon for New Masculinity.
American men have, for about a generation now, been derided and castigated as part of the monovalent “patriarchy.” It all kind of creeped up on us. Now, I’m coming at this issue as a rabid anti-MAGA New Right person. I fucking hate MAGA with a white hot rage, to the point that I’m writing five novels that lay out — in subtext — how and why I fucking hate the movement so much.
Zelensky
Anyway.
The point is –I’m very empathetic to women who want to “slay the patriarchy.” And, yet, the point could be made that “slay the patriarchy” is kind of like “defund the police.” It is a slogan that is easily used to get a crucial element of the body politic — “Traditionalists” to join the fucking MAGA New Right and destroy that precious commodity known as democracy.
And, remember, it is actually pretty rare for there to be a “vibe shift” in the way men perceive themselves. The thing that would tip off a vibe shift — how men appear — isn’t really applicable. Dudes are dudes. Either you’re wearing a suit to work and have power and influence or you don’t.
So, I’ve sat up and taken notice at how it’s beginning to look as though the standard, traditional masculinity of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky is beginning to show results. What’s key about all of this is he doesn’t follow the current American media narrative about what it means to be masculine. If this was a Hollywood movie, Zelensky would be a woman struggling to run a nation while “slaying the patriarchy.”
But, surprise, he’s a dude doing traditional dude things in a traditional dude way. There’s no plot twist or flipping the script. It’s the traditional narrative of a man rising to the occasion on the world state in an effort to protect the collective home and hearth of his besieged nation.
So, we now have something of a cultural and historical question before us. Is this just a blip as part of a broader, macro trend towards traditional male values continuing to be disparaged or is there a change that we’re on the cusp of a “New Masculinity” that harkens back to the leadership of Lincoln, FDR and Churchill.
I honestly don’t know. For that to happen, I think we would have to actually have, like, uh, WW3. Only a major global war would force us to appricate the value of traditional male roles and concepts. I’ve already suggested something along these lines when I posited that our current “woke” culture will end around 2024 – 2025 when we decide as a nation if we’re going to be an autocracy or have a civil war.
So, I don’t know. It’s all very much up in the air. It could go either way.
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