When one left high school in 1990, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was but a year away from being no more. For better (and really) worse, the United States had George HW Bush’s “kinder and gentler” nation spiel as the foreign policy. That went bye bye due to “Saddam Hussein,” said with typical Bush’s hyperbolizing of such threats. The invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 coincided with other personal concerns: college. The January 1991 response by coalition forces coincided with another concern: getting an internship while the U.S. economy was in “recession” that had a jobless recovery. One though had hope; the U.S. was merely experiencing normal ups and downs, the President would improve, society had come a long way as people worked hard and helped each other through difficult times.
The Downward Spiral
One must admit I was wrong. The new world order, without a USSR, provided an opportunistic pitfall that most Americans have slowly slid into over the last thirty years. Bush, for starters, pitched that New World Order, spoken of, with the likes of Kissinger or his intellectual superior, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Among these 1970s heavyweights of policy, China was the keystone to that globalizing plan. Making them a capitalistic, consumeristic democracy would solidify their bona fides as the greatest statesmen the world had ever known. Of course they didn’t say that - but one opines that their egos wrapped that idea around in their heads as they obtained significant compensation from the outsourcing U.S. manufacturing, innovation (IP), and American MNCs HQs, ostensibly, to a Communist country. Places like the Carlyle Group gave them an arms-length outlet.
After various proxy war fighting, for some mysterious reason, these diplomatic clowns thought the Chinese were oblivious to Capitalistic subversion of their supreme control of their peasant population. The CCP took all the tech and manufacturing they could get, and discarded the Democratic urgings of these neolibs & cons to come.
Result: 100 million happy-if-the-social credit-score-is-high Chinese middle class exist. The peasants are just the highly selective farm system for the next generation of CCP members. The United States 3rd rebuilding project (Germany, Japan, China) will be its last - as its once innovative blood drains from its corpse before it is buried finally.
In 1998, as the U.S. was building up Internet 1.0, and people rocked out to Chumbawamba, Zbigniew’s fanboys tell of issues in Ukraine and China:
As the twentieth century draws to a close, the United States has emerged as the world's only superpower: no other nation possesses comparable military and economic power or has interests that bestride the globe. Yet the critical question facing America remains unanswered: What should be the nation's global strategy for maintaining its exceptional position in the world? …
Why the fate of Ukraine and Azerbaijan are so important to America. Why viewing China as a menace is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Why America is not only the first truly global superpower but also the last—and what the implications are for America's legacy. Brzezinski's surprising and original conclusions often turn conventional wisdom on its head as he lays the groundwork for a new and compelling vision of America's vital interests. [ My emphasis.]
Ukraine wasn’t important to America in 1998. It was made important by foreign policy hacks in the U.S. State Department needing a conflict with Russia. (Neocons like Toria Nuland, her hubbie, Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol are war pigs.) Soon after the collapse of USSR, with a Ukraine possessing a nuclear arsenal, it was determined they should not possess those weapons, ostensibly (one thinks) because even as BAD as the USSR was with their weaponry, allowing the Ukrainians such awesome power, was bound to end in disaster of unparalleled human proportions. (And here we are again, knocking on this position.)
Viewing China as a menace was not the wrong assessment. Their own generals were planning for war with the US, as their 1999 title, Unrestricted Warfare notes exactly who their opponent is. This title opened citing the Gulf War of 42 days. It goes into what is not an unfair criticism of Washington D.C. specifically, (but not Americans):
“Perhaps those who feel this most deeply are the Americans, who probably should be counted as among the few who want to play all the roles, including savior, fireman, world policeman, and an emissary of peace, etc.” [My emphasis.]
Presidential Puppetry
The Presidency is run by the banks. Their policies (ask former PM Liz Truss) are beholden to Wall Street and their older cousins in London and on the continent as well. The banks are the bane of all human beings due to their ultimate wishy-washy, war-is-good for society business plan. The I-Bankers and Hedge Funders invest in such demises and destructions because war is a profitable racket for them alone.
From George HW Bush to Biden, the policies of Washington are about creation of an enemy to fight. After Vietnam, with a war hangover cocktail spiked with the Trickle-of-Watergate (overblown by the media and Democrats), kinetic war lost popular support. To fill the war void, 1980s war language ramped up on drugs, domestic violence, and poverty, among other things. None of those wars were won either; as we lost miserably on drugs (thanks CIA and China)! Domestic violence (how did COVID help that along? It increased it.) And poverty is now more pervasive than ever on the inner city streets along with murder.
(Note: The War on Drugs is wrongly placed at Nixon’s feet by the Left. When Nixon left office, 3 years after his call in 1971 for a “War on Drugs,” Federal and State incarceration totals were not supportive of any actuality of upticks in such enforcement. The upticks took off significantly under the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations. All those executives thereafter (Joe Biden assisted here!) in creating the laws and enforcement policy instead of improving society that worked well enough from 1925 through to 1960. Tricky Dicky was not responsible for this.)
Our Wall Street-bought idiots in D.C. just made all of these problems much worse - and funded additional agencies (adding technocrats that do nothing) - instead of investing in stable families, educating people to stay together through thick and thin, and graduating from high school and getting a first job to learn skills to apply further along in their lives.
This degrading of America came out of the tumultuous 1960s that was about liberating certain folks from personal responsibility through drugs (LSD) and sex (hippy rapes did occur). And from all that social engineering trajectory - we, in the US, now have rampant divorce, incarceration and uneducated children in single parent (predominately mother-run) homes. But we fund the maintenance of this because: it turns out there is a good ROI for bankers, lawyers, judges and prison operators. (These people literally call soon-to-be-released prisoners a “recyclable resource.”)
Presidents are not solely responsible - they can be through Executive Orders and the population’s ill-informed obliviousness to these EOs - but more substantially, its Wall Street (subordinated by the likes of BlackRock) and Federal Agencies (in their D.C homes) who make these policies. D.C. folks are among the richest people in the USA as they gladly steal from ordinary Americans through FEDERAL TAXES & FED $$$. (These folks do not produce quality GDP - though they equate paper pushing, lawyering/lobbying, and financializing everything as productive. (2021 Forbes.)
Their failures come from a divorce from such middle America realities and a contempt that arises from being held as the blame from the gutting of America. (Overregulating, creating laws/loopholes and putting in subversive policies, are ALL their fault.) Moreover, these are highly blue areas that think they are succeeding “in helping.” Helping themselves as members of a Class Conscious & unaccountable group of people whose meaningful skill is being a Spoiled Bureaucrat or Lobbyist.
Societal Divorce
One heard about MTG’s suggested solution. She is not the first to propose this as a solution. As always, people ran to the political corners, like this is a cage match to be fought about resources, productivity, and who is morally right on mentioning this as an alternative to a bloody Civil War. (One will suggest it would be the bloodiest in Human History, if such a conflict took place.)
One could argue for the reasonableness of this alternative. I, for one, want to be left alone. I don’t want us to come to a duel over who is the better side, the more sane one in the room. I know for certain China, Russia, Iran, and the list of enemies could run into the dozens of countries would LOVE to see us destroy ourselves. (Never stop your enemy when they are in the midst of self-destruction.)
But I also know Washington D.C.’s FATAL FLAW is thinking, We Deplorables, MAGA “Republicans”, White Supremos, or other smears will ever forgive them and fight on their side in a REAL WAR that they have (or will) inevitably PROVOKE. We see the people in D.C. (the Uni-party that spends like a drunken Uncle Sam on a Hunter Biden strip club tour through Eastern Bloc countries) as the beating heart of evil now. (I may be speaking out of turn, regarding the prospect of fighting alongside these Classless Kleptocratic DC bureaucrats, but I doubt it.)
I can dream a few good men and women exist in the D.C. area. But given their pre-planned, spiteful DOJ response regarding January 6, their media lackeys’ abuse of the population through constant belittling of fellow Americans (who are not all white, not all male, not all heterosexual), to demoralize and shame us all into submission, I will take the position there are very few courageous souls left inside, or nearby, The Beltway. And they have wasted their “good” by staying silent during this destruction.
Cowards behaving like brave souls while they steal luggage and put our nation’s national security at risk. (Just two years ago, MIT did this puff piece on Brinton.) People that coerced children to take vaccines for COVID when the mortality risk was even less than the normal flu (and is tied to one’s immunocompromised status, not the virus). The same Agencies that lie about funding GOF in Wuhan, contort economic numbers, and make every last single news event about racism or Wall Street’s ESG obsession with a WEF carbon/depopulation agenda.
Joe Biden rubber stamps every idiotically evil EO that his advisors write. It is doubtful Joe reads a single word of the orders he signs. His sole role is to shout out Ad Homs at his “fellow Americans/enemies” if they don’t agree to more drunken spending or apologize for whatever is the new racist thing on Pravda NBC, Pravda CBS or Pravda ABC.
So while I do not want to be a Serf under a CCP/Russia Axis, the UN or the WHO, I am also G-DDAMN tired of D.C.’s threats and demonization of more than half the U.S. population. If not for those “F-16s and nuclear missiles”, China Joe, Washington D.C. would barely concern anyone on this planet. Because it would not exist.
We are in a multi-polar world and this universe is only going to fracture further.
Great article, Jason. Your piece sums up what most of us Deplorables have been thinking for a long time.
I am one of those "patriots" that thought advancing the empire was in our interest in 80s/90s. I was a Pat Buchanan supporter in 1992. Over the last few decades, I thought I was going Left on the ideological spectrum, only to see some of the Left was going farther left than I could go, and some go past me to facism. I thought Obama was going to "right" our foriegn policy to only see him "virtue signal" peace. There are FEW Rs, or Ds that will arrest our fall. Trump was very inperfect, but to see the establishment react like a crazy loon, probably sealed the deal for me. No more war, no more feds, no more anything the fed level.....cut it all, devolve powers downward.