So I got thinking today about slime molds. They’re really fascinating — creatures? The truth is they defy most characterizations: they’re not plants, they’re not animals, they’re not even fungi although they were characterized as fungi for a long time. In fact, the various groups of slime molds aren’t even related — “slime mold” turns out to refer to behavior.
But that behavior is fascinating. They are completely decentralized: the ones in that video don’t even have cell walls — instead, they’re one blob with lots and lots of cell nuclei. They have no brain whatsoever but they can move to find food, they can solve mazes, they can learn. In fact (see the video) they can solve some problems that are tough going for humans.
The Democrat Party reminds me of slime molds.
It’s not that I think the Democrats individually are completely brainless — they’re people, each with their own motivations, drives, desires. But when they (and the Deep State if there’s any real distinction) are threatened, they respond as a mass organism.
That’s more like another variety of slime mold, Dictyostelium. Most of the time, they are individuals, happily living their little amoeboid lives. But in the face of environmental challenges, they rush together and form a moving … thing … that seeks better conditions, and forms spores that can spread their organism over a wide area, so they can colonize other more conducive environments.
(This metaphor can be carried to amazing and amusing lengths, for example as people flee California to move to red states, but then vote for the same policies that made their previous environment untenable. I’ll leave those as an exercise for the interested reader.)
But one thing the thing doesn’t do is develop a central controller. It still has no brain. The whole blob responds to stimuli and acts to satisfy the need that brought them together.
Trump’s election was just that kind of threat to the thing. It’s tempting to think the response is due to some central controller, some single leader or cabal that directs everyone.
But the existence of a single cabal, or even a few centralized groups, just beggars imagination. Oh, there certainly are some — the Clinton crime family, which managed to maintain good enough relations with the Obama cabal to go to the mattresses when they realized Trump was a real threat. I suspect there’s a similar in-group within the upper ranks of the Intelligence Community, especially at CIA and the (recently created) Office of the Director of National intelligence. But the barrage of leaks, “anonymous sources”, and bureaucratic resistance probably weren’t being coordinated by anyone.
Nor did they need to be.
It’s much more plausible, if not as easy, to imagine a whole bunch of individual “Governor LePetomane” responses, all saying “we’ve got to protect our phony-baloney jobs.”
The Biden mob, while subservient to Obama, capo di tutti capi, had their own rackets, collecting the vigorish on various grants, aid packages, and government loans that could be exposed if another bunch took over.
The Clintons’ Cosa Nostra (literally “our thing” I just realized) needed an explanation for why Hillary lost even though it was her turn.
The upper ranks of the FBI, CIA, and Obama’s White House all realized that their political operations before the election, during the transition, and even after the election, wouldn’t stand the scrutiny they were confident they’d never have endured under President Hillary.
The Puerto Rican Territorial Government realized that while Hurricane Marie was exposing their decades of corruption, misfeasance, malfeasance, nonfeasance and general graft, if they printed some t-shirts they could get lots of time on the news to blame everything on Trump.
Even the media, those stalwart defenders of Truth, Justice, and … okay, well, Truth and Justice anyway could be depended upon to toss their remaining self-respect in the trash to attack an “illegitimate” president, who they knew was illegitimate because he was just Not Our Kind.
They all realized that the only answer was to do something to stop Trump, elections be damned. That’s why the demands to impeach and #Resist started the moment the election was decided.
We don’t need to imagine there’s some grand Deep State conspiracy, or even to imagine the Deep State is a Thing. It doesn’t have to be.
It’s just slime.
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