Sobering Thoughts On A Friday Morning. Plus ...

Christopher Roach has an overall insightful article today at American Greatness. It won't astound you with brand new ideas, but it's put together well and reinforces the perceptions that many commenters have been offering. Certainly there's a close kinship to the ideas that Tucker Carlson, for example, has been offering for some time now:

A MAGA Bay of Pigs

After the lockdowns and election issues of 2020, the MAGA movement is now a full-on “anti-regime” movement rather than a Trump-focused one. 

I recommend it all, but here are some excerpts that were, for me, highlights. First, Roach sets the stage:

The domestic spying, impeachment, and election irregularities of the Trump presidency matter because of what they tell us about the managerial system. All the public talk of democracy is for show; the whole point of the bureaucracy and the party system is to prevent any popular, democratic movement that would threaten the ruling class’ privileges. 

As President Trump put it, “They don’t hate you because they hate me. They hate me because they hate you.” 

 

I'll skip over Roach's analysis of January 6. Here, in what follows and following on from his intro, he gets to the heart of where conservatives are at this point in history vis a vis the ruling class:

Antifa was always a tool for those in power, in spite of their uncouth appearance. 

The attack on the Capitol, however, has made the ruling class enraged and a little scared. They are now acting accordingly. Everyone involved will be prosecuted, and many will be charged with serious offenses that carry long prison sentences. Adjacent people and institutions will also feel the heat. Denying Biden’s electoral legitimacy will be deemed the equivalent of denying the Holocaust. 

We have already seen the strength of this effort with the coordinated censorship of social media, the mass arrest of demonstrators, financial harassment of right-leaning organizations and figures, and the suddenly bellicose rhetoric of the Defense Department. The FBI hinted at the coming crackdown with the ludicrous suggestion that right-wing terrorism is a bigger threat than Antifa and BLM. 

This is like the Reichstag Fire for the Left. 

In other words, the crackdown in response to the Capitol protest will far exceed the event’s magnitude. This is certainly not the worst violence our country has seen, nor is Trump alone in loose talk. Former President Obama bears a lot of responsibility for the BLM murders, including those of five Dallas police officers for his similarly incendiary rhetoric.  Moreover, last summer, many prominent Democrats now calling mere trespassing an “insurrection” were encouraging violent action in the name of the Black Lives Matter movement. 

Selectively condemning violence because of the offenders’ political affiliation, along with the overwrought talk of a “coup” and pious incantations of how the protests defiled the sacred “House of the People,” is all a little too much to bear. The Capitol has long been a den of thieves, replete with sexual offenders, crooks, and sycophants for the oligarchic class. What happens there on an average week is a greater offense to the Constitution and principles of democracy than the January 6 protest. 

Unfortunately, Roach doesn't offer much in the way of a way forward. His idea is to wait while the ruling class overreacts and creates more and more "dissidents." For my money, the suggestions I've read about creating alternative platforms to communicate in the Public Square are far more useful than such passive counsel. Nevertheless, it's useful to remind ourselves of just where we stand.

A good place to start, of course, is staying up to date with the revelations that are about to come from the Russia Hoax declass. Today John Solomon fleshes out his podcast that I covered yesterday. Nothing new so far, but a more finished offering compared to Solomon's hurried podcast:

Trump declassifying trove of FBI memos exposing Steele's motivations, ties to impeachment witness

Once-secret documents will show Steele told FBI he leaked Russia collusion narrative to counteract Clinton email scandal.