A friend of mine wrote me yesterday to send me an item linked by Tyler Durden over at Zero Hedge. The original is a post by one James Howard Kunstler, and it begins as follows:
The tides are shifting. Something’s in the wind. And it’s not just the fecund vapors of spring. The political soap opera of RussiaGate ended like a fart in a windstorm last weekend, leaving Mr. Mueller’s cheerleaders de-witched, bothered, and bewildered. And then a crude attempt was made to cram the Jussie Smollett case down Chicago’s memory hole. These two unrelated hoaxes emanating out of Wokester Land may signal something momentous: the end of the era when anything goes and nothing matters.
Welcome to the new era of consequences! All of a sudden, a whole lot of people who have been punking the public-at-large will have to answer for their behavior.
My friend added:
The Mueller Report.
The Jussie Smollett Day disgrace.
The Stormy Daniels lawyer and media darling unmasked as a serial criminal.
The media denial.
The Southern Poverty Law Center implosion.
What a historically good week for unmasking the death of shame.
It certainly has been a heady couple of weeks! Alas, though, I think that Mr. Kunstler is far too optimistic. As I replied to my friend (who lives in a far-flung corner of the Anglosphere), all these things would, in peacetime, be terrible, career-shattering, party-wrecking embarrassments. The thing is, though, that there’s a bit of a civil war going on over here, I think, and so the only rule now in play is this:
Defend your people, always. Attack the enemy, always, with whatever comes to hand.
As the historian Michael Vlahos has been explaining to John Batchelor these past months: you don’t know, except in hindsight, when civil wars have begun. (It strikes me as being much the same as falling into a black hole: once you’ve passed the event horizon, all possible pathways lead through the singularity — even though, to the person falling in, there’s nothing noticeable about the event horizon itself.)
So while the Blue team has every reason to feel humiliated and abashed, it isn’t going to happen. When the stakes are existential, as they are in American politics in 2019, people don’t surrender; they only fight on more desperately.
One Comment
I’m reminded of the Weather Underground, who committed many acts of terrorism in the 1960s and 1970s. The leaders did little or no jail time and are now high paid lawyers and consultants, and personal friends with the Obamas. To the Left, Smollet and Russiagate are not crimes, just tactics that failed.