Senatus Populusque Americanus

At the time I am writing this, it is January 6^th, 2021, and just shy of eleven o’clock at night. Today, I watched a mob of flag-waving, non-violent protesters swarm the steps of the United States Capitol building, force their way inside, terrify those elected officials that we so amusingly call leaders, and then, after meandering about like adventurers on a self-guided tour, they left. In their wake, some hard drives from the bizarrely unguarded, unsecured computers of high-ranking members of the electoral body were confiscated.

An unarmed woman was shot to death by the police, and by what available video evidence suggests, there was no reason for it. Her name was Ashli Babbit, she had spent fourteen years in the military, and a DC Policeman ended her life with a single bullet fired into her neck. You can try to find the video online, some still exist. What’s striking is that the cop only fired once.

Erick Erickson, a mind-numbingly popular radio show host, called for these protesters to be shot. He wasn’t alone. And he got his wish, too, though given his rhetoric, one wonders if he feels a shred of disappointment—what, only one? The tweet was deleted for, shockingly, violating Twitter rules.

The national guard got called in. It was mobilized without the authorization of the President. The original request had been blocked when the Mayor tried to get our boys in green. Instead, we got to hear it confirmed that it was Pence, Schumer, and Pelosi who gave the order, after convening with the Secretary of Defense. An hour or two later, Twitter locked Trump’s account, after censoring several of his tweets. And this was after he released a recorded statement urging the protesters to relax, take it easy, that he understands the frustration, that he recognizes the theft of the election, and that the best we can have right now is peace.

The Mob

Peace.

Need we remind ourselves what that term means after last year? Peaceful. Mostly peaceful. Search our memories, meditate on this, ponder the exactitude of the phrase. Peace. It’s supposed to mean something. We’ve forgotten what.

Of course, I don’t need to come out and say it. I don’t need to write it down. We all know the double standard. A reporter for CNN can stand in front of a burning building while people break windows beside him and assure his audiences, however pathetically, that these protests over the accidental killing of a felon are mostly peaceful. Chris Cuomo can pontificate emptily about where, exactly, it says protests shouldn’t scare people, as images parade across his own show of cars getting torched and retail stores go up in flames.

But put a few thousand people in the colors of our country and waving the stars and stripes on the steps of the Capitol building, and now we’re talking about a visible threat to democracy. Let them scuffle with police a bit, and it’s an insurrection. Let them into the public building that they pay for, and it’s a siege. Question the results of the election and, well, the governor of New York volunteers to send a thousand of his national guardsmen down to the District to “ensure a safe transfer of power”. We’ve seen that happen before, and hopefully, we can all remember where it leads.

The people within the system will not admit that they screwed up. They don’t even realize that they have. Their conception of leadership amounts to hiding under desks when the people they answer to walk in for a surprise workplace audit. Congressmen don’t know how to deal with unscripted questions. They apparently can’t even handle eye contact. The MAGA mob wasn’t a marauding mass of molotov-throwing anarchists overcome with a Dionysian spirit of destruction. They pushed into the Capitol building and followed the velvet-roped walkways into its inner chambers and then stood around taking selfies. A couple offices got raided. In the professional world, this is called “the guys from corporate have decided to make an unscheduled visit.” In a democracy, it’s called a revolt.

They hate you. Every GOP establishmentarian does, too. There are no good senators, here. No good representatives. No good elected officials. When flag-waving self-styled patriots, who have watched their country burn this past year, their relatives die unjustly in seclusion, their friends and parents put in handcuffs for rejecting frivolous mask mandates, their businesses fined out of existence for simply trying to stay open, and who lost the last shred of faith they had in the electoral process when November ballots were invented out of thin air—when they decided they had to talk to the people that they thought answered to them, those officials wouldn’t even show their faces.

The guilty flea where none pursueth. There was, admittedly a mob. They had no weapons. They had American flags and a rather shameful preponderance of selfie sticks. They were dressed to have a good time. And they looked exactly like the typical crowd of MAGA types that have become something of a staple of local political rallies in the past four years. They were young women and old women, young men and old men. They didn’t wear masks, most of them, and were not afraid of being identified. And perhaps most striking were the heart of their aesthetics: they carried high their flags and waved them above their heads: a contrast to the treatment of the flag during the so-called mostly peaceful protests of the past year. Keep in mind, too, that the rioters still ‘demonstrating’ in Portland, Oregon wave their flags high, too, but they’re the flags of communists.

And when this horrifying, unruly mob of peripatetic patriots managed to force their way into the congressional chambers, what did our leaders have to say to them? Most of them had been evacuated, of course, too terrified or disgusted by their own people to even be in the same room with them. Those few who didn’t took the opportunity to cower under desks and behind banisters, perhaps weeping and soiled, for a photo-op. Please, give us sympathy! Please, we’re frightened, feel sorry for us! There should be nothing but disdain reserved for this display by our sarcastic political betters. Those that the MAGA mob believed that they had elected to lead them now cried crocodile tears when they had merely to breathe the same air as the unwashed proles.

American civics classes have told us for decades that they answer to us. That they’re elected by us. That we choose our leaders and legislators because we’re a properly-functioning liberal democracy. Sure, the classes will admit, we have our hiccups now and then. It doesn’t always work smoothly. There’s corruption to be found. It’s not perfect. But, all the same, it’s the best we’ve got.

The people in DC today found out, in no uncertain terms, that this isn’t true. They aren’t answerable to you. If you don’t like what they do, who do you appeal to? The same courts who dismissed volumes of evidence for voter fraud completely out of hand without even reviewing it? The executive who seems paralyzed by an unfriendly administration that he, himself appointed? A media who regularly lies, slanders and misleads to bolster the Regime, and is consistently made up of people who openly disdain the people of their own country?

The people in DC have found out that they do not have recourse anymore. The horrifying thought is occurring to some of them that they never had recourse in the first place, that the system of checks and balances, American freedom, and individual liberty haven’t really been part of American life for longer than they’ve even been alive. As the conservative voices they listened to in alternative media and politics one by one reveal themselves to be turncoats sympathetic to the globalist Regime, “where did it all go so wrong?” is a thought not distant from their minds.

Post-liberal radicalization is coming. The GOP has pivoted back to the soft-libertarianism and neoconservatism that characterized its days before Trump. The same legislators that talked big against tech censorship and social values have found their old scripts again, attempting—stupidly—to make the sort of conservatism of 2014 function in 2021. It won’t. Today’s times are increasingly marked by perversion and governed by social media to such a degree that the old-style libertarian leanings simply can’t be believed by most Americans. When half the country is out of work, an election’s been stolen, and there’s the media buzz of a global pandemic, nobody wants to hear about pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. More Americans have begun to realize that such idle talk gets pushed by their politicians as an excuse to do nothing.

Just Build Your Own Platforms

Meanwhile, the consolidation of so many private media companies under left-wing ideology has led to entire swaths of information management being coordinated by the same handful of people. Five years ago, Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer fame was completely un-personed in the space of a few days—social media, PayPal, even his bank, all of them had him removed from their platforms on account of his admittedly radical beliefs. But this wasn’t a man who had actually done anything except host and publish literature. The conservative establishment, recognizing that he was so fringe, didn’t bat an eye.

This happened again, more famously, in 2018, except this time to the most prolific and oft-slandered alternative media personality Alex Jones. It’s fortunate that this wasn’t his first rodeo, since he had backup platforms to rely on. He’d had them built himself. But the damage was done: YouTube removed everything officially related to InfoWars and Alex Jones, severely limiting his reach. The conservative establishment again did nothing, because Jones was supposed to be their own boogeyman. He had always been branded a conspiracy theorist despite the fact that, once you cut through some of his sensationalism, almost everything he talked about tended to be backed up.

The following year, something similar happened to Enrique Tarrio, the then-leader of the Proud Boys. His bank canceled their services with him and the site that he ran promoting the group’s merchandise. The feds didn’t freeze his assets. Chase Bank was the one who decided to sever his funding.

It’s very important to keep in mind that this isn’t the FBI. These weren’t cases of law enforcement doing investigations into possible threats of domestic terrorism. It was so-called private companies doing it to their own clients and being so big that could get away with it. There is something to the notion that private companies should have the right to refuse service for any reason, but what happens when there are only a handful of private companies left and they’re all bigger and more powerful than your local government? Liberals and Conservatives alike have had decades to formulate responses, but instead, they’ve sided with big business every single time.

And now they’ve done it to the President of the United States. He’s only President for another week and a half, but he’s the President all the same. The story here isn’t that mean old Jack Dorsey had it in him to give the Bad Orange Man the boot. The story is the coordinated effort across all of the major social media platforms to do so, the relationship these companies have to other services, and place this event holds as the capstone to a long line of such behavior leveled at people presumed to be on the right.

Private companies that control the information of nearly every single American, firmly integrated into a vast network that includes financial hubs, goods distribution, and infrastructure, have a stranglehold over what the entire country is allowed to believe. The cyberpunk dystopia we’re living in won’t just be a chip in your head—that’s coming soon enough, don’t worry. It’s worse: imagine Pravda having control over your bank account and your phone, and it quietly shows you pictures of your kids the way the mafia would compliment their manners.

Most Americans don’t believe such a revolution is coming, but all of us have a vague, unnamed, intuitive fear that it’s a real possibility. Those of us extremely-online recognize that this future is almost already here, and with the incoming administration taking its cabinet picks from the pages of 2020’s Who’s Who in Tech and Finance, it’s guaranteed to be cemented into place by the end of the year.

Errors of a Tech Exodus

It’s now been a couple of days. We pretend to lurch back toward normalcy and our pundits publish their self-important think pieces to the typical big-brained publications. Some of them haven’t been bad. Most, predictably, have been hysterical. It’s called an insurrection, a riot. About a hundred people are on a list to be rounded up by feds for their role in it. More than fifty already have been, including a lawmaker from West Virginia that marched with the mob.

The President, while technically still the President, has as far as we can all tell, been cut off from power. His own Vice President has claimed to be serving the process and the system. We know now, of course, that this is codespeak for serving the same oligarchs that number Pelosi and Schumer among their lackeys. They’ve spoken with the Defense Secretary and the Pentagon, who has decided to back the administration that isn’t supposed to even exist yet. Trump has been accused of staging a coup. By definition, what we’re seeing is that he’s been the victim of one.

In the mean time, acting as a single unit, Big Tech has enacted sweeping bans on major political and media figures wholesale. Facebook and Twitter have both permanently banned the current President of the United States from their platforms. We can pretend like this isn’t that big of a problem, as if social media doesn’t poisonously occupy an unwarranted and unprecedented place in our lives as a primary source of information. We can pretend like this doesn’t somehow mean that Trump is effectively isolated from speaking directly to his base, which was the only remaining sign of the man’s populism. We can pretend it’s not a big deal, but we all know that it is.

We could take it in stride that Parler, an openly center-right platform formed specifically as a Twitter alternative, has been removed from Apple and Google app stores and has had their hosting dropped by Amazon Web Services. We can roll over again now that our social media accounts will get more policed and eventually locked. We can go outside, tell ourselves we were too addicted to the internet anyway, and move on with our lives. And we can do that, and when CitiGroup informs us that they will no longer offer us banking services, when Master Card cuts off our line of credit, when PayPal says we’re not welcome to use their platform to receive money, our astonishment won’t be feigned because we’ll have genuinely not seen it coming.

There is value to being online. We should not be consumed by the information cycle, of course, and we should avoid overindulgence. But what’s happening in the real world is directly affected by the patterns we’re seeing unfold on the internet. Undue retreat from this sphere is a surrender; doing so is a tacit admission that the Enemy is too strong to face even with our gaze, so we would rather turn away and ignore the field. But we are not called to surrender to the world and its champions. We’re called live in the world and not of it; we’re called to evangelize, when possible, and transform it as best we can into an image of the Truth. This is our moral prerogative, but even speaking in practical terms, abandoning the field now is just asking for the enemy to come and fight us even closer to home.

With this in mind, we must recognize that it is not possible to compare the information-soaked techno-world of 2021 to the days when mail arrived on horseback and news was always three days old. The internet—and our precious sophisticated technology—could very well be wiped off the planet in the blink of an eye. A solar storm of unprecedented strength could probably do it. High-altitude nuclear warfare could do it, too. But barring such extraordinary events, these features of life are here to stay—and be further revolutionized themselves. Grant as we might a certain ethos to Pope Leo XIII’s condemnation of electric streetlamps, we nonetheless cannot pretend as though these inventions simply don’t exist.

Our civil war has so far been informational. It will continue to be so. I’m not willing to make so bold a prediction as those made in the wake of the First World War—by which I mean that Americans will never enter into armed conflict with one another ever again. They’ve done so on a massive scale twice in our short history already. We avoided it a third time in the 1960s only by a narrow margin, and only because the nature of such a war was altered by the people who were interested in waging it at the time. It could be argued that the resolution to that war was a not-so-amiable divorce, at least in terms of values. Where the result of 1775 was separation, and that of 1861 was of centralization, the result of 1968 was pacification; our elites embraced a hedonism made sustainable by advancements in pharmaceuticals and electronic engineering, while those Americans that recognized these as errors passively acknowledged that the world was a fallen place and man a fallen creature. But they made little material effort to stem the tide.

Half a century since that defeat and the American people are now several generations into a drug crises that has no solution, a sexual revolution that demands their children be castrated according to the whims of unimpeachable psychologists, the industrialized murder of the unborn that has left more than sixty million infants killed by their own mothers or by professionals they hired, the demographic displacement of over a hundred million people from the third world into American communities, the replacement of American labor with American service, the hollowing out of its economy in favor of centralized app-based “gigs”, the embrace of investment finance at the expense of goods production, and the permanent proliferation of its military across the planet.

I’ll admit it: things look pretty grim. In a certain sense, those of us citizens of an America we remember fondly as the home of the free and the land of the brave—we don’t have a country anymore. For Americans, our civic identity is so wrapped up in the functioning of our civic government that when we lose the latter, we find ourselves in crisis. The same thing happened, rightly or wrongly, in 1860. But things aren’t as they were in 1860. The flow of information and its content is so radically different than comparisons even to just twenty years ago to today are difficult, much less ones going back that far.

People on the right would do well to remember this. Stay online. But this isn’t the only issue. Getting involved in your local community organizations—not necessarily politics, mind you—is vital. Participation and involvement in groups affiliated or related to your church is a good place to start. If I’m risking pessimism for a minute, I’m almost of the opinion that depending on where you live, activity in local politics is a waste of time. It greatly depends on the region, of course, but 2020 has revealed the extent to which even local governments are completely compromised from the top down. But it’s hard to say that for sure, I might be jumping the gun on this one. In any case, involvement in groups that are not directly political is key. Know people, network, be a real person.

Conclusion

Peace. Hell blot black for always the thought.

What is peace? What does it mean to these people? Antifa harasses and burns the country. Black Lives Matter embarks upon race crusades marching in lock-step with self-avowed, stars & stripes-burning communists. Were these insurrections? Where they insurrections when they burned and vandalized the city municipal buildings in Philadelphia?

Never forget what was inflicted upon on Minneapolis, upon St. Paul, upon Portland. Don’t forget what the then-mayor of Baltimore did during the Freddie Grey riots of 2015. “Give them space.” They burned down low-income neighborhoods, destroyed livelihoods, homes, businesses. The mayor suffered no repercussions. She was removed from office on totally unrelated corruption charges—just like, it should be noted, all of the other Baltimore mayors going back fourteen years.

Our cities aren’t supposed to be like this. Our elites aren’t supposed to be this way. Our country isn’t supposed to immolating every election season at the drop of a hat. None of this is right. We can tell ourselves this is normal but we all know—on the left and the right—that it’s not. The pattern of the last four elections has been of growing instability, wilder pendulum swings, and greater promises of a return to normalcy. For as long as this system endures, there won’t be a return to normalcy. The pendulum will just get worse, because the really insane beliefs will settle into the landscape. We see this happen again and again with the offensives of the sexual revolution. The openly anti-white animosity on display by now center-left groups is becoming that way as well.

If you’ve been online for long enough, you’re probably tired of simply pointing out the double standards of the left. You should be. By now, I should hope, it’s obvious that it’s a tactic that only galvanizes a certain segment of your own sympathizers. The people on the other end of such accusations either don’t consider the hypocrisies you point out to be hypocrisies at all, or they don’t care if you point them out. It’s not an effective offensive tactic. Five years of doing it may have helped make cohesive a multi-generational right wing coalition, but the steam is running out. We all know of the hypocrisies of the left now. It’s gotten to be tedious just listing them.

Keep in mind the purpose of politics. It’s power, of course, at least by what we’ve been watching. But power remains a means. Is it power ordered toward the end of the aggrandizement of someone’s ego? It’s tempting to collapse our politics into such a ham-fisted portrayal of authoritarianism, especially in this day and age. But to what end is politics supposed to be ordered to? To what end is power supposed to be wielded? The Catholic knows the answer to this question. Popes write about it in every socially-oriented encyclical that gets published.

Politics exist as a service to the law, and the law exists both to keep order and to prevent the worst excesses of man’s sinfulness from destroying his society. Our present crisis and angst is over the fact that the current application these things leaves quite a bit to be desired. We’re watching the beginning of what could be a wholesale institutional collapse happen in real time. Absent a just law, we are obligated all the more to take care to safeguard our interior dispositions against the scandal of the world. Things are going to get both crazier and dumber. We can’t just prepare ourselves mentally for the sort of lunacy that’s coming down the pipeline; try as you might, everyone’s mental fortitude has its limits. You can only be told to repeat so many obvious falsehoods before you start to break.

What’s necessary to weather this isn’t just mental fortitude. It’s spiritual resilience. The providential nature of history is made more visible the more insane the times seem to get. The more our patience is tested, the more we should recognize God’s will, the more we should be seeking Him instead of the false comforts of this fallen world. We should be in prayer, engaging with the Sacraments, keeping a close guard over our proclivities. We should be undertaking at least some (mild) penances, devotions, fasting. These things not only have the temporal benefits of building our discipline, which contributes to our mental fortitude, but when properly ordered, they contribute to God’s ability to better heal us from our broken states.

This is a spiritual war, and the Enemy is out in force. Be prudent in the affairs of the world. Organization and information are crucial. If we are to be effective exteriorly, our interior lives must be ordered. That is only possible through the means given to us by God. We are expected to tend this overgrown garden until He decides our time has come. When the consummation of the world is at hand, we’ll definitely know. Take comfort: unpleasant as the future will be, that time has not yet come.