The Divine Mr. M

An analogy is haunting the United States – the analogy of fascism. It is virtually impossible (outside certain parts of the Right-wing itself) to try to understand the resurgent Right without hearing it described as – or compared with – 20th-century interwar fascism. Like fascism, the resurgent Right is irrational, close-minded, violent and racist. So goes the analogy, and there’s truth to it. But fascism did not become powerful simply by appealing to citizens’ darkest instincts. Fascism also, crucially, spoke to the social and psychological needs of citizens to be protected from the ravages of capitalism at a time when other political actors were offering little help.



The origins of fascism lay in a promise to protect people. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a rush of globalisation destroyed communities, professions and cultural norms while generating a wave of immigration. Right-wing nationalist movements promising to protect people from the pernicious influence of foreigners and markets arose, and frightened, disoriented and displaced people responded. These early fascist movements disrupted political life in some countries, but they percolated along at a relatively low simmer until the Second World War.



The First World War had devastated Europe, killing 16 million people, maiming another 20 million, crushing economies and sowing turmoil. In Italy, for example, the postwar period saw high inflation and unemployment, as well as strikes, factory occupations, land seizures and other forms of social unrest and violence. The Liberal Italian governments of the postwar era failed to adequately address these problems. The Liberals’ constituencies – businessmen, landowners, members of the middle class – abandoned them. The country’s two largest opposition parties – the socialist PSI and the Catholic PPI – also offered little effective redress to these basic social problems.



Benito Mussolini and his National Fascist Party (PNF) stepped into the breach, taking advantage of the failure or ineffectiveness of existing institutions, parties and elites, and offering a mixture of ‘national’ and ‘social’ policies. Fascists promised to foster national unity, prioritise the interests of the nation above those of any particular group, and promote Italy’s stature internationally. The fascists also appealed to Italians’ desire for social security, solidarity and protection from capitalist crises. They promised therefore to restore order, protect private property and promote prosperity but also to shield society from economic downturns and disruption. Fascists stressed that wealth entailed responsibilities as well as privileges, and should be administered for the benefits of the nation.



These appeals enabled the fascists to garner support from almost all socioeconomic groups. Italy was a young country (formed in the 1860s), plagued by deep regional and social divisions. By claiming to serve the best interests of the entire national community, it was in fact the fascists who became Italy’s first true ‘people’s party’.



After coming to power, the Italian fascists created recreational circles, student and youth groups, sports and excursion activities. These organisations all furthered the fascists’ goals of fostering a truly national community. The desire to strengthen (a fascist) national identity also compelled the regime to extraordinary cultural measures. They promoted striking public architecture, art exhibitions, and film and radio productions. The regime intervened extensively in the economy. As one fascist put it: ‘There cannot be any single economic interests which are above the general economic interests of the state, no individual, economic initiatives which do not fall under the supervision and regulation of the state, no relationships of the various classes of the nation which are not the concern of the state.’ Such policies kept fascism popular until the late 1930s, when Mussolini threw his lot in with Hitler. It was only the country’s involvement in the Second World War, and the Italian regime’s turn to a more overtly ‘racialist’ understanding of fascism, that began to make Italian fascism unpopular.



Italian fascism differed from its German counterpart in important ways. Most notably, perhaps, anti-Semitism and racism were more innate in the German version. But Italian and German fascism also shared important similarities. Like Italy, Germany was a ‘new’ nation (formed in 1871) plagued by deep divisions. After the First World War, Germany had found itself saddled with punitive peace terms. During the 1920s, it experienced violent uprisings, political assassinations, foreign invasion and a notorious Great Inflation. Then the Great Depression hit, causing immense suffering in Germany. The response of the government, and other political actors, however, must also be remembered. For different reasons, both the era’s conservative governments and their socialist opponents primarily favoured austerity as a response to the crisis. Thus came a golden opportunity for fascism.



Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) promised to serve the entire German people, but the German fascist vision of ‘the people’ did not include Jews and other ‘undesirables’. They promised to create a ‘people’s community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) that would overcome the country’s divisions. The fascists also pledged to fight the Depression and contrasted its activism on behalf of the people’s welfare with the meekness and austerity of the government and the socialists. By the 1932 elections, these appeals to protect the German people helped the Nazis become the largest political party, and the one with the broadest socioeconomic base.



When, in January 1933, Hitler became chancellor, the Nazis quickly began work-creation and infrastructure programmes. They exhorted business to take on workers, and doled out credit. Germany’s economy rebounded and unemployment figures improved dramatically: German unemployment fell from almost 6 million in early 1933 to 2.4 million by the end of 1934; by 1938, Germany essentially enjoyed full employment. By the end of the 1930s, the government was controlling decisions about economic production, investment, wages and prices. Public spending was growing spectacularly.



Nazi Germany remained capitalist. But it had also undertaken state intervention in the economy unprecedented in capitalist societies. The Nazis also supported an extensive welfare state (of course, for ‘ethnically pure’ Germans). It included free higher education, family and child support, pensions, health insurance and an array of publically supported entertainment and vacation options. All spheres of life, economy included, had to be subordinated to the ‘national interest’ (Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz), and the fascist commitment to foster social equality and mobility. Radical meritocratic reforms are not usually thought of as signature Nazi measures, but, as Hitler once noted, the Third Reich has ‘opened the way for every qualified individual – whatever his origins – to reach the top if he is qualified, dynamic, industrious and resolute’.



Largely for these reasons, up till 1939, most Germans’ experience with the Nazi regime was probably positive. The Nazis had seemingly conquered the Depression and restored economic and political stability. As long as they could prove their ethnic ‘purity’ and stayed away from overt shows of disloyalty, Germans typically experienced National Socialism not as a tyranny and terror, but as a regime of social reform and warmth.



There can be no question that violence and racism were essential traits of fascism. But for most Italians, Germans and other European fascists, the appeal was based not on racism, much less ethnic cleansing, but on the fascists’ ability to respond effectively to crises of capitalism when other political actors were not. Fascists insisted that states could and should control capitalism, that the state should and could promote social welfare, and that national communities needed to be cultivated. The fascist solution ultimately was, of course, worse than the problem. In response to the horror of fascism, in part, New Deal Democrats in the United States, and social democratic parties in Europe, also moved to re-negotiate the social contract. They promised citizens that they would control capitalism and provide social welfare policies and undertake other measures to strengthen national solidarity – but without the loss of freedom and democracy that fascism entailed.



The lesson for the present is clear: you can’t beat something with nothing. If other political actors don’t come up with more compelling solutions to the problems of capitalism, the popular appeal of the resurgent Right-wing will continue. And then the analogy with fascism and democratic collapse of the interwar years might prove even more relevant than it is now.



https://aeon.co/ideas/fascism-was-a-right-wing-anti-capitalist-movement

America does not have a far left movement.

Our far-right are Fascists.

Our center-right are extremist nationalists.

Our center-left are classical conservatives.

Our far-left are moral centrist moderates.

Any objective political compass would place politicians like Sanders or Warren barely left of center.

A real far-leftist movement would be advocating for forced property seizure of the Capitalist Ruling class by the Working class.

Instead our far-left is like "don't let people die in medical poverty, please"

November 6, 2021 (Saturday)

As soon as the Democrats in the House of Representatives, marshaled by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), passed the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (H.R. 3684) by a bipartisan vote of 228–206 last night, Republicans began to say that the Democrats were ushering in “socialism.”

When Republicans warn of socialism, they are not talking about actual socialism, which is an economic system in which the means of production, that is, the factories and industries, are owned by the people. In practical terms, that means they are owned by the government.

True socialism has never been popular in America, and virtually no one is talking about it here today. The best it has ever done in a national election was in 1912, when labor organizer Eugene V. Debs, running for president as a Socialist, won a whopping 6% of the vote, coming in behind Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft. True socialism isn't a real threat in America.

What politicians mean when they cry "socialism" in America today is something entirely different. It is a product of the years immediately after the Civil War, when Black men first got the right to vote.

Eager to join the free labor system from which they had previously been excluded, these men joined poor white men to vote for leaders who promised to rebuild the South, provide schools and hospitals (as well as desperately needed prosthetics for veterans), and develop the economy with railroads to provide an equal opportunity for all men to work hard and rise.

Former Confederates loathed the idea of Black men voting. But their opposition to Black voting on racial grounds ran headlong into the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which, after it was ratified in 1870, gave the U.S. government the power to make sure that no state denied any man the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” When white former Confederates nonetheless tried to force their Black neighbors from the polls, Congress in 1870 created the Department of Justice, which began to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan members who had been terrorizing the South.

With racial discrimination now prohibited by the federal government, elite white southerners changed their approach. They insisted that they objected to Black voting not on racial grounds, but because Black men were voting for programs that redistributed wealth from hardworking white people to Black people, since hospitals and roads would cost tax dollars and white people were the only ones with taxable property in the Reconstruction South. Poor Black voters were instituting, one popular magazine wrote, "Socialism in South Carolina."

This idea that it was dangerous for poor working men to have a say in the government caught on in the North as immigrants moved into growing cities to work in the new factories. Like their counterparts in the South, they voted for roads and schools, and northern men of wealth too insisted these programs meant a redistribution of wealth through tax dollars.

They got more concerned still when a majority of Americans began to call for regulation to keep businessmen from gouging consumers, polluting the environment, and poisoning the food supply (milk was preserved with formaldehyde, and candy was often painted with lead paint). Wealthy men argued that any attempt to regulate business would impinge on a man's liberty, while an army of bureaucrats to enforce regulations would cost tax dollars and thus would mean a redistribution of wealth from men of means to the poor who would benefit from the regulations.

Long before the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia brought the fears of a workers' government to life, Americans who opposed regulation insisted that their economy was under siege by socialists. That conviction did indeed lead to a redistribution of wealth, but as regular Americans were kept from voting, it went dramatically upward, not down.

Regulation of business and promotion of infrastructure is not, in fact, the international socialism today’s Republicans claim. According to Abraham Lincoln, who first articulated the principles of the Republican Party, and under whom the party invented the American income tax, the “legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves---in their separate, and individual capacities.” Those things included, he wrote, “public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased, and the machinery of government itself.”

Heather Cox Richardson

“2020 is the first Presidential election since 1860 and 1877 to see a potential situation that could escalate all the way into an outright civil war. I don't think such a thing would remotely resemble 1860 because the scenario is different. I see it as somewhere between Mexican cartel war and the Colombian Civil War in real terms and that it would take a long, long time for the American public to accept the shift from Kyle Rittenhouse and Dylan Roof style terrorism to a full fledged war and to admit that there is one.

1860 was a completely different era and political culture where it was easy to create well armed forces on the fly, if not to command them well and this did a lot to play into just how many people died in the battles that followed precisely because it was that easy. Here? It wouldn't fit that model well but it's the closest scenario of any and I'm not sure what happens, but the civil war prospects have become much starker and more real than they used to be”

~Tamar Denny

“I have been telling Leftists to arm themselves for over twenty years now and got treated like I was David Duke for my troubles. Some are starting to listen now.”

~Nebris

Director Erika Cohn’s new film, Belly of the Beast, part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival which goes digital in the U.S. from June 11 to 20, brings to the fore the undeniable and continued legacy of eugenics and forced sterilization in the state of California.

The documentary follows the case of Kelli McDonald, a black mother who was told she had cysts and needed surgery while incarcerated, only to discover, over a year later and after months of menopausal symptoms and extreme weight loss at the age of 24, that she had been given a hysterectomy (McDonald’s doctors never told her they had performed a hysterectomy on her). Risking retaliation, McDonald decided to speak out even while she was still in jail and teamed up with the prison abolition legal aid organization Justice Now, founded by attorney Cynthia Chandler, to find justice. Belly of the Beast is about the freedom work McDonald, Chandler, and the Justice Now team—whose board members are all currently incarcerated women—do against all odds in the service of female survivors of all kinds of violence, not just at home but from the state.

In the U.S., many regular people still believe in eugenics, particularly when it comes to the country’s enormous incarcerated population, and especially when those people are poor black women. This makes sense because the practice of eugenics was pioneered in California beginning with a 1909 law that sanctioned the sterilization of those deemed “unfit,” from poor black and Native mothers to people with mental and physical disabilities to the criminalized. In fact the Nazis borrowed their eugenics project from the U.S. and the state of California specifically. Much of what American schoolchildren are taught are evils that originated in the sick minds of Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels in fact were first practiced by their own state officials.

To the film’s great credit, instead of performing typical liberal disbelief around the discovery that eugenic sterilization persists today, Belly of the Beast shows how the very practice springs forth from the U.S. project and white American imagination. When journalist Corey G. Johnson published his article on the present-day sterilizations-sans-consent happening in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, a deluge of racist and fascist comments came in from regular people about how (to paraphrase) “all black people should be sterilized” and performing eugenics, especially on people who are incarcerated or on welfare, is “A-OK.” This is the reality McDonald, Chandler, and organizations like Justice Now fight against: The U.S. is a country in which degrading and devaluing human life in order to “save the state funds,” as eugenics doctor-in-chief James Heinrich put it, is deemed reasonable in the court of public opinion, and even—often—in the judicial court system as well.

This is why, at the center of Belly of the Beast, the projects of prison abolition and reparations are essential. There is no reforming a system that systemically and illegally sterilizes its women in order to save the state welfare dollars. Two of the CDCR nurses interviewed in the documentary even admit they didn’t know the practice was actually banned, and had been since 1979. One of the nurses, who participated on the condition of anonymity, says that she wouldn’t have made anesthetized—in other words, drugged up—women sign their rights away if she had known it was illegal; but later, she confesses that she thinks sterilization should be legal in prisons, and that Dr. Heinrich, one of the many doctors who haphazardly and evilly carried out these sterilizations, was right to want to save the state money. The interview makes it clear that prisons are not designed to rehabilitate—quite the contrary. The other CDCR nurse underlines this point by saying that even if it had been technically legal (which it wasn’t), there’s no way for a person to consent to any major decisions while incarcerated, since prison guards and administrators have too much power over them. This is why, for example, the law deems it impossible for a person to consent to sex with a correctional officer while incarcerated. This is our U.S. correctional underworld, where you must be protected—at least technically speaking—from your own lack of rights.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/inside-america-horrifying-modern-day-085759022.html

~So, back in FB jail for 'saying mean things' about my own ethnic group. /sigh

Interesting thing, tho I miss my FB pals, I feel somewhat relived at not scrolling thru the daily horror show, you know..Trump, Biden, the endless corruption and venality, that 'virus thing' and all the idiots ready to go out and die 'For Freedom!' That shit wears on a fella...

Speaking of Politics [like what else do I do?] I'm usually pretty good at seeing the way forward, but all of the above has thrown all of that out the fucking window. I can no longer say WTF is going to happen between now and Inauguration Day, including whether there will even be one.

I'm thinking Bernie dropped out when the DNC told him they were gonna have a 'virtual convention'. That shitcanned any possibility of a 'floor fight' because there ain't gonna be no fucking floor. TBH, I'm not even sure if Biden will end up being the actual nominee. He may have just been the tool to pry Bernie loose. I would not be too surprised if he 'stepped back for health reasons'. Fuck knows, he's a bloody wreck and ain't gonna improve. Maybe the DNC can convince its donors that Warren has sold out enough to be 'safe'.

As for Trump...? He's def losing his shit. I keep hoping he'll drop dead or get La Rona and choke on his own sputum. But he'll prob just keep getting mini-strokes for the next decade and die drooling while sitting in his own shit.

I suspect he wants the Post Office to die because that would kill mail in voting, tho more likely it would kill his reelection. He's too disconnected from 'regular folks' to realize that the loss of the PO would outrage even his sociopathic base.

I also suspect he believes he can stay in the White House by derailing the election entirely. His legal advisors have probably told him that's not how it works. If there is no election by Jan 20th, 2021, his term in office simply ends and the choice of who becomes President gets thrown into The House. “I'll fight it out in the courts,” is his likely retort.

I do hope Trump is insane enough to insist on a physical convention for the GOP. That'd kill off a lot of those assholes, tho fuckers like Moscow Mitch and Kevin 'The Haircut' McCarthy would probably keep their distance. ”Open Up America!!”

On a personal note, our fridge and new lil freezer are both packed with grub and we have plenty of paper products.

I've been working on my Alt-History/Alien Space Bats/Space Opera novel and it is a blessed relief to hide in that world for a few hours each day. This week I plan to unpack and hook up the new printer that has been sitting in its box in the hallway for the past six months or so. Goddess willing, it will fare better than its two predecessors.

...and that is pretty much that. Stay safe, kids.

...this is from Jul. 23rd, 2013..I thought now would be a perfect time to re-post it...

"All politics is local." ~'Tip' O'Neill

~Which is why, in the end, democracy fails. Because humans are, as a rule, 'provincial', which is a socio-cultural way of saying that they are primarily concerned with their own immediate sphere of interest, tend to ignore everything outside of that sphere and react with fear/anger whenever the larger sphere impinges. That prevents most humans from thinking 'globally' or even 'nationally'. Now hold that thought...

"Why should I concern myself with how many die? Even the Christian Bible says what is man that God should be mindful of him? For me men are nothing but a brain at one end and a shit factory at the other." ~Aurelio Peccei, founder and first president of the Club of Rome

In 1972 The Club of Rome published a historical document, “The Limits to Growth,” described by Wikipedia as a “book about the computer modeling of unchecked economic and population growth with finite resource supplies.” I remember at the time it generated a lot of speculation and controversy, but for the general population, like so many things before it, it went down The Memory Hole, eclipsed by Watergate and then the Fall of Saigon. [see "All politics is local."]

Aurelio Peccei was one the authors of that report and his sentiments are fairly clear.

“The Limits to Growth,” was also, I have come to believe, a warning to the population of Earth from The Western Financial Elites; “Since you are obviously incapable of controlling your own affairs and managing your own resources, we are going to gather up as much of them as we can lay our hands upon, build ourselves safe havens and let the rest of you drown in your own shit. In fact, we plan to expedite that by making things as bad as possible in order to get this over with as fast as possible.” In other words, a Culling.

I suspect they made that decision not so much because they are evil – though there is certainly some sociopathic reasoning in the mix – but because, seeing that “All politics are local,” they already knew that the solutions required to head off Global Catastrophe would be impossible to implement. Keep in mind that at the time The Cold War was still going strong, America was socioculturally unraveling and China had just wrapped up The Cultural Revolution.

In that context, I really cannot fault the logic, even if I am one of those likely to culled.

I have imagined snippets of conversations such as these, uttered not at secret meetings in darkened rooms, but at bright social gatherings over cocktails:

“Let it all got to hell.”

“They will rebel.”

“We'll make Consumerism ubiquitous and fund their social hatreds.”

“But we cannot control something like that.”

“No, but we can guide it and we can survive it. We'll surf the apocalypse.”

If I were in their position, I'd do much the same thing, though as those of you who know me will understand that my 'grand scheme' is of a somewhat different design. And because of that, while I expect this Culling will more or less succeed, I have my doubts that it will play out at all close to what The Elites hope for.

But the die have been cast and now what shall be, shall be...

Trump hates what they hate and is destroying what they feel has been stolen from them. His base is happy to see it all burn down.

"In the gun control debate, one reason why self-defense against tyranny is brushed off so often is because a lot of folks making that argument love tyranny.

No conservative militia would defend their black and brown neighbors against state violence. None of them lift a finger against ICE. They always defend the most repressive elements of the state, from the police to the army. They always make excuses for grotesque wealth inequality. They’re happy to attack whistleblowers at the service of the deep state (the only reason some of them criticize it now is because they think it’s politically biased, as opposed to the enormous power it wields).

The vast majority of marginalized people, including myself, don’t believe that mainstream gun culture favors our freedom. It’s exclusively authoritarian, made by and for traditionalists, nationalists, and others like them. These people want to regulate what kind of marriage is legitimate, what bathrooms trans and non-binary people can use, whether their kids are gay or straight, who can come into the country, and so on. At their worst, they’ll kill us themselves. The idea that those same people will stop LARPing the American Revolution and actually fight tyranny today is hilarious. Nobody believes it.

It’s terrible, because the core argument is correct. Taking guns away from the public and leaving the state with the authority to use them is terrifying. The state is always the greatest purveyor of violence. In the US, where police regularly profile and kill black people for the most trival bullshit, robbing them of even the slightest chance of an equal playing field is incredibly dangerous. The old Black Panther Party was able to prevent police violence against black people by open-carrying guns, and because of this, conservatives at the time were strong proponents of gun control. Liberals love to quote Ronald Reagan on the topic …

"Americans don’t go around carrying guns with the idea they’re using them to influence other Americans. There’s no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons."

… but either don’t know or gloss over the fact that he was justifying a racist law, passed in response to the Black Panther Party resisting racist police.

We see the same reactionary underbelly of gun control today. The justification behind New York’s stop-and-frisk law “is to disarm likely suspects, although it has become a general law-and-order measure, particularly to enforce gun laws.” Existing laws, especially stop-and-frisk, disproportionately target black people. As much as authoritarians of different stripes would like to claim otherwise, laws are not neutral in practice. We are socialized into hierarchies. The existence of law is proof enough; the idea that we can isolate law in a vacuum, away from hierarchically-defined behavior, is absurd.

Gun control doesn’t just control the distribution of guns. It controls people. And more often than not, it controls marginalized people.

Back in 2012, there were 1,360 militia groups in the US. How many of those do you think were radical? Anti-racist? Anti-fascist? Can you even name one? Whatever answers you came up with, I’m sure they were deeply uncomfortable. This is not a position we want to be in. This is why a radical gun culture is overdue for us. This is why we need individual and communal self-defense. We’ve made some progress with organizations like Redneck Revolt, the John Brown Gun Club, Trigger Warning, the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, and probably a bunch of local groups I’m not aware of. But we’re still outgunned. Radicals need to make a complete break with liberalism on this front. That doesn’t mean fetishizing violence, as authoritarians do. It means recognizing that the freedom of one is the freedom of all. It means recognizing that this principle actually means something, and that you’re willing to do whatever it takes to defend it. It means a profound love for your neighbor — no matter what race, gender, or sexuality they are — that transcends any political or philosophical principle, and that love is not the same as being passive.

That’s what self-defense against tyranny really means."

via cyclideon:

"All politics is local." ~'Tip' O'Neill

~Which is why, in the end, democracy fails. Because humans are, as a rule, 'provincial', which is a socio-cultural way of saying that they are primarily concerned with their own immediate sphere of interest, tend to ignore everything outside of that sphere and react with fear/anger whenever the larger sphere impinges. That prevents most humans from thinking 'globally' or even 'nationally'. Now hold that thought...

"Why should I concern myself with how many die? Even the Christian Bible says what is man that God should be mindful of him? For me men are nothing but a brain at one end and a shit factory at the other." ~Aurelio Peccei, founder and first president of the Club of Rome

In 1972 The Club of Rome published a historical document, “The Limits to Growth,” described by Wikipedia as a “book about the computer modeling of unchecked economic and population growth with finite resource supplies.” I remember at the time it generated a lot of speculation and controversy, but for the general population, like so many things before it, it went down The Memory Hole, eclipsed by Watergate and then the Fall of Saigon. [see "All politics is local."]

Aurelio Peccei was one the authors of that report and his sentiments are fairly clear.

“The Limits to Growth,” was also, I have come to believe, a warning to the population of Earth from The Western Financial Elites; “Since you are obviously incapable of controlling your own affairs and managing your own resources, we are going to gather up as much of them as we can lay our hands upon, build ourselves safe havens and let the rest of you drown in your own shit. In fact, we plan to expedite that by making things as bad as possible in order to get this over with as fast as possible.” In other words, a Culling.

I suspect they made that decision not so much because they are evil – though there is certainly some sociopathic reasoning in the mix – but because, seeing that “All politics are local,” they already knew that the solutions required to head off Global Catastrophe would be impossible to implement. Keep in mind that at the time The Cold War was still going strong, America was socioculturally unraveling and China had just wrapped up The Cultural Revolution.

In that context, I really cannot fault the logic, even if I am one of those likely to culled.

I have imagined snippets of conversations such as these, uttered not at secret meetings in darkened rooms, but at bright social gatherings over cocktails:

“Let it all got to hell.”

“They will rebel.”

“We'll make Consumerism ubiquitous and fund their social hatreds.”

“But we cannot control something like that.”

“No, but we can guide it and we can survive it. We'll surf the apocalypse.”

If I were in their position, I'd do much the same thing, though as those of you who know me will understand that my 'grand scheme' is of a somewhat different design. And because of that, while I expect this Culling will more or less succeed, I have my doubts that it will play out at all close to what The Elites hope for.

But the die have been cast and now what shall be, shall be...

Note: I wrote the above a little over four years ago. I'd say that given the recent electoral outcome the wheels may have come off the concept I proposed. Not that I'm saying it was not a valid hypothesis to begin with, but that its potential flaws are now glaringly obvious.