Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

So who has markers on UFO landing for 2020? Rain of frogs? Plague of Locusts? Oh, wait, I’m confused, aren’t I? Even though I’ve picked up a friend’s resounding refrain of “Let my people go!” the script 2020 is running is “Let’s keep the people captive, and we’ll inflict what we have to on them, up to and including complete and utter destruction, as long as we can keep our spurs on them and our seat on their backs.”

Look, it was predictable. It has been obvious for decades to those of us whose experiences predispose them to keep a weather eye for tyranny on the horizon. By the time I came to the States I was startled to find not only was it not the bastion of freedom I’d hoped, but even though then—at the pinnacle of the cold war—it stood as the opposite pole of communism, the reality on the ground was not …. quite as advertised. Among the intellectuals and soit disant thinkers even in the early eighties, communism was cool and socialism was “compassionate.” Just like in Europe.

Because you see, the cold war had two sides: the USSR and our elites, who had been corrupted and taken over for a long time thanks to the communist agents who had long-marched through our media, our entertainment and our bureaucracy.

Heinlein claimed the Democrats had been taken over by communists, secretly, by the 40s. I have no reason to doubt him. I’m sure most of the bureaucracy and governments in Europe had been taken over that way also.

Even so called conservatives assumed communism would eventually win, because according to the numbers coming out of the USSR and the reporters visiting the USSR—anyone know where Duranty is buried? there should be a line to piss on his grave—they were just so much more efficient. Scientific governance, you know? And anyway, technology was going to be so advanced that most humans would be unemployable, and by the way, there were more and more humans every year, so it was impossible to have all these bourgeois luxuries. So communism, efficient, compassionate, communism was the future, the only way.

The realists who saw it was the only way were willing to do anything to bring it about. Because the people who weren’t as intelligent/well informed would otherwise destroy the world and bring about unimaginable catastrophe.

“Conservatives” were merely those who wanted communism to arrive slower and be a little less violent. Communism with a human face. Socialism on the way to communism. Easing us into our role as cogs in the machinery of the future—where there was no room for personal frills or really emotions—with gentle pneumatic shocks, instead of with the excesses of the Russian and Soviet revolution.

All of this btw is based on three glaring fallacies (phaluscies, since you have to be a dickhead to believe them particularly now.)

1- People are a drain not an asset. They are also a sort of robot incapable of changing behavior in response to changing circumstances.

2- Wealth can’t grow, nor can the carrying capacity of the Earth improve. So since humans can’t respond to reduced infant mortality by having fewer children, the only way to feed everyone is to reduce everyone’s rations. Forever.

3- It is possible for “the best”, properly educated people to be utterly selfless and to administer everyone’s wealth equally and for the common good. They will not revel in power, nor will they avail themselves of any excess. Because, they are absolutely moral and all seeing.

Note the left is still running this script. And some on the right too (Hello, Pierre Delecto!) not to mention all of Europe, left and right. Also note #1 conflicts with the left idea that they can bring about a future in which humans change to be all selfless, etc. But that’s actually complicated and tied in to their myths, which honestly are a Christian heresy, complete with paradise lost.

I know when they started out, the USSR thought it could “engineer” a new human. Homo Sovieticus. But I don’t know enough of Soviet myth to know what underlay that. Maybe it was a behaviorist thing and they thought humans could be trained into being completely selfless automatons. I know by the time I was reading communist theorists (no, I didn’t buy their arguments, but I was required to read them, given when and where I grew up) in the seventies, the philosophy had fallen prey to the agitprop notion that people in madhouses in the US were political prisoners just as in the USSR. (BTW this is part of what underlay the closing of the madhouses.) And that was part of a push in the seventies, as the malfeasance of USSR was starting to be glaring, amid escaped dissidents and escaping information. The push was to “prove” that both systems were equally bad. (The left is still flogging that dead equine, too. So Cubans and Venezuelans are starving? So how many people die of anomie and not being loved enough under capitalism? REEEEE.) So, since Soviets put dissidents in mad houses, so did we. But that necessitated that people who widdled on themselves and/or thought they were a lampshade with a set of dishes thrown in be completely sane “political dissidents”. The only way to do this was to attribute anything communists don’t like to “insanity brought about by capitalism.” This led to crazier byways of thought. For instance, it led to the idea of the pre-historic, pre-agriculture paradise, where everyone was equal, there was no poverty, need, greed, or the heartbreak of psoriasis. A sub-branch of the church believed women were in charge and everyone worshiped the mother goddess. And some of these “scientific, atheist socialists” also believe the goddess actually exists, though G-d doesn’t.

So, forgive me for taking this long digression through complete insanity, but it’s important because it’s part of how the left argues. This is how “capitalism” (which is their bizarre name for the free exchange of goods and services) is responsible for everything from neurosis to murder, from your art not being appreciated to war. If we just did away with private property, we’d have a “brotherhood of man” (and for the current form of the cult, it must be said and can’t be understood that man includes woman, people who have to look in their pants to figure out what they are, and people who look in their pants every morning to remember what they are, and people who look in their pants and don’t like what they see. And people who think they’re wingless dragons and ornate buildings) where no one is ever greedy or mean.

This is the picture in the left’s heads right now. The fact that it has bloody nothing to do with reality doesn’t matter. They have begs and explanations for all the glaring discrepancies. Because these require bending backwards and folding your mental processes into a mobius strip and really believing in received wisdom, they believe this makes them “smarter.” It is part of what led to the idea that having the right (left) opinions was the definition of being “smart.”

Anyway, this was the landscape when I came to the US. If you were so uncouth as to say you supported Reagan, you were obviously either stupid or crazy. And you were definitely an “extremist.”

Which brings to where we’re now.

A funny thing happened in the middle of the Long March on the way to the great socialist paradise.

Other than the fact that Reagan dismantled the USSR and exposed their lies. (Though don’t expect the left to admit it.)

You see, the more convoluted and cult-like the left became, the more the people selected as “smart” and given positions of power or accolades for their achievements are not even second rate. They are, instead, typical “followers” and cult converts. Which is a definite personality type, and one known neither for flexibility or creativity. (Which explains the sorry state of our establishment arts and literature and, really, any entertainment.)

It also explains why they keep getting sucker punched by change And why their clever plans are starting to resemble Wile E. Coyote “genius.”

And we live in a time of extreme change driven by technology. All their efforts to drive us back to the 1930s keep backfiring, because you can’t put tech back in the bottle. So, you know, they took over the media only to see it become completely irrelevant. And the more they tighten their grip, the more irrelevant they become. They drove genre publishing into the ground by allowing ONLY the approved opinions.

And they’re in the process of losing what remains of their power by trying to hold onto it.

EVERYTHING—everything—from the Obama administration preparing a coup on his successor and violating the law in ways that should make everyone apologize to that old statist Nixon, to the insane attempt at an impeachment, to the overreaction panic the media drove over Winnie the Flu which has managed to destroy the economies of the US and the west, to the current riots to avoid the “danger” that the economy will recover before November elections: ALL OF THIS are attempts to hold on to power.

The fact that the attempts are increasingly crazier, and keep backfiring in more and more spectacular ways is your measure of how inadequate the left is to the task of coping with reality, and how much their foundational myth is letting them down.

Yes, it’s going to get rough. They’ve proven they’ll do anything and destroy anything in order to get power back. Not a surprise. They are the ideological kin of those who rule in Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea. Reigning in hell is what they do. They’ve also proven they don’t understand the US is not any of those and that they just don’t GET us or just how prosperous and inventive the US is. In fact that’s part of their problem. They don’t GET either creativity or invention.

Someone said the Trump superpower is to reveal what is going on behind the leftist pretences. Maybe. At least he’s not cooperating in the farce (in most cases. I still have issues with his going along with the Winnie the Flu “experts.” Though he learns, and I’m fairly sure it’s the last time he’ll do that.) But to an extent this was going to happen.

Sooner or later the left was going to hit reality. They’ve been on a collision course a long, long time. Their attempts to hold on to power have been getting more and more outrageous. Sooner or later, it was going to explode in their faces. It was just a matter of timing.

Well, the time is now. 2020 is the year of seeing clearly. Just remember what you’re seeing, the sewer of leftist corruption, power-greed and insanity has been there a long time. Maybe eighty years. What you’re smelling is OLD. It’s part of the reason it’s so bad. Due to the complexity of the media, it’s been festering a long, long time.

Hold on to your hats. It’s going to get worse. And the plagues they visit on us, in an attempt to re-mount are going to get more outrageous.

Just remember this is not the result of their being strong but the result of their—literally—losing their grip.

Stay ungovernable, my friends. Stay American. The left can’t stand that. And it is the way we’ll win, they’ll lose. Be not afraid!

 

Reprinted from According to Hoyt for June 1, 2020