Is 2020 really any worse than other years? Because my circles, online and off, are convinced that 2020 is something special in the way of crazy.
Some years, of course, sort of have that vibe, either crazy or depressing. I remember “2016 is a stone-cold killer” and a lot of it had to do with the fact that a lot of well-known celebs hit the age at which they were likely to die.
And honestly, that might be part of the vibe to 2016 in my circles. I mean, let’s be fair. In our fifties or late forties, we’re not precisely elders on life support, but we are starting to hit the years in which attendance at funerals exceeds attendance at weddings.
And in our own case – and a lot of my friends’ cases – 2020 was always going to be a year of turmoil, characterized as “the years life changes a lot.” Mostly due to job situations, or kids moving off, or the kind of milestones you hit in late middle age.
However, none of that justifies, for instance, this haiku making the rounds of my circles (and I can’t credit it as it came to me at several removes) a couple of months ago:
Bloody hell, what now?
Oh. Of COURSE this happens now.
We are all so tired.
What we are witnessing, in my opinion, at world-level (not just in the U.S.) is sort of a nervous breakdown of the cognitive elites.
You see, for generations now, the cognitive elites – those educated in the best institutions and groomed for positions of power and prominence in politics, the arts, entertainment, education, and other public life – have been indoctrinated with Marxist beliefs. If Marxism were just an economic theory, even a faulty one, this would not be a problem.
Alas, Marxism is something else. It is a “Complete theory of how the world and history works.” (Yes, this translates as “bullsh—,” which is why some of us who had the “best” educations broke out of indoctrination early. Which honestly also probably cost us status, but hey.) Which means the people who bought it (the vast majority, since humans are social apes) “knew” their place in the world and history as well as any medieval peasant who was sure of his duties on Earth and his fate after.
It is something that is very comforting and sees people through all sorts of crises.
I’d like to say the election of or paradigm-shattering president destroyed that certainty.
It certainly helped smash the idea that the future is “inevitably” socialist, but it wasn’t the only blow. There were other elections, including Brazil’s and Poland’s, and the Brexit vote in Great Britain (including the improved “We told you once, you bastages!” second vote.) There were the riots in France, which, yes, involved the Black Bloc, but also had a ton to do with the fact that elites have been squeezing ordinary Frenchmen out of life, particularly in the countryside. These riots shouldn’t have happened under a leftist president, so they were a mind-shattering event for the left. Then there was the increasingly more obvious weakness of China, which has been their “ideal” since shortly after the USSR fell.
So, part of what we’re witnessing all over the world, from locking up your own citizens based on a high-school girl’s model, to hysteric demands for mask use (Seriously? They want to mandate them INSIDE the house? How insane is that?) is the fact that the left’s worldview is fracturing, people aren’t reacting like their models predicted, and they’re trying to hold onto power at any cost.
And of course, our experience in the United States is unique because we Americans do everything bigger, better, and sometimes more insane.
For instance, the nervous breakdown of the left has been going on since Donald Trump was elected. I’m not going to confess to having spent the two weeks after watching videos of crying media personalities, or to sometimes returning to those for a pick-me-up. It’s none of your business what I do with my own time and my own computer.
More serious were the various campaigns the left has been running, from trying to convince us that Russia tried to elect Trump for… reasons… to the whole insane dreamed-up Ukranian collusion narrative. Most of these are projection, by the way. Yes, they are insane, but they start with the left assuming we’re doing what they do. For instance, the Ukrainian narrative made lots of sense to the left since a lot of leftists were dipping into the Ukrainian corruption bucket.
The actual modus operandi of the left is that they start to run the next campaign as soon as the last one collapses, and that each narrative is more detached from reality than the last.
And by 2020 they had worked themselves into a fine fit of complete insanity.
In case you don’t remember – January was, after all, at least ten years ago in subjective time – in January we were all going to die, because Trump had started WWIII by drone-killing an Iranian terrorist. This is also known as “In which we who grew up during the Cold War roll our eyes.” In other words, it’s an oldie but a goodie. We all remember how Ronald Reagan was going to start World War III by talking tough to the Russians. I would suspect the left of using this to encourage American submission and destruction, but really, most of them really were and are that cowardly. In fact, for most of them, their political position comes from the desire to be eaten last.
This was followed by the “impeachment” over the “Ukrainian phone call,” which most of us who understand international politics followed with open-mouthed horror. No, not at anything President Trump had done, but at the sheer insanity of the gambit.
When that collapsed, there was this virus from China. Which, came on the heels of the left saying the economy really needed to crash. And which by March all of us knew was not nearly as lethal as they claimed.
They played to their strengths and ran the most thorough psi-ops operation in history, with the result that those who have never paid any attention to politics, and who aren’t very well versed in how many people die in the U.S. of various causes, are now convinced we’re all going to die from something that mostly kills people over 80 or with serious conditions.
And yet that was starting to bomb (pardon the pun) too because even in real emergencies, where people see the real issues outside their window, crowds mostly want to live normally. So people were starting to open up and ignoring the increasingly more insane mandates of the politicians and the hysterical reports of the media.
So we got riots, nominally sparked by George Floyd’s death. (Note that he’s all but disappeared as a casus belli from the riots, and now we’re hearing more and more demands for redistribution and to smash capitalism.)
I suspect these are starting to not work, big time, too. People are getting sick and tired of watching police stand around and their mayors and governors join in/try to appease the protesters. We have indications this is so, such as the fact that woke sports are bombing big time.
And, as before, new things are showing up. But in the long padded room of the soul, into which the left is descending, screaming, each new attempt to make us go back to the Marxist script is not just an escalation, it’s also crazier.
This is in part because the orders from the top are getting more frantic and desperate (and if you doubt the left reacts to orders from the top, all you have to watch is how fast whatever the new watchword is promulgates everywhere) and because their support comes from people who are – in the best of times – marginally attached to reality and therefore put a bizarre spin on everything.
For instance, my governor (well, not mine. A gift of vote-by-mail. I mean, there might be exceptions, but I think when a state goes vote-by-mail it never elects Republicans again. What a coincidence.) is convinced that unless he locks us up ever more tightly, seventy thousand Coloradans will die. This is of course based on an unfalsifiable computer model.
So, the same left that has tried to make all vote by mail a thing (because standing in line to vote is so much more dangerous than, say, standing in line at Walmart) is now terrified that Trump is somehow going to cheat using the post office. On their own, they’re doing more to discredit their infallible weapon of vote-by-mail than Trump ever could. They’re also discrediting any theory that actors are thinking creatures.
Yes, hard as it is to believe, some of them are dumber than Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis.
Mind you, I’d be laughing a lot harder about this nonsense if it weren’t for the fact that 70% of the country has already decided to vote by mail, and that there’s this coincidence that no place voting by mail elects Republicans.
Still and all, as the riots, too, start to play against them, I’m starting to look at my 2020 bingo card. Glossed over in the insanity that is this year have been things like an attempted panic over “murder hornets” and rats having wars in the increasingly deserted cities.
I know a lot of people are saying the next move is targeted assassinations, and that my fans accuse me of holding out for Cthulhu rising from the sea (not true).
But for my money, I’m betting on alien landings. Amid the crazy that is 2020, we’ve already had the FBI tiptoeing to the line of the whole UFO mess.
Again, if it weren’t for the power they still wield over our lives, and the fact that the death of their ideology is rendering them crazier and crazier, these death spasms of Marxism would be highly entertaining.
Bonus wink-nod for fans of Heinlein’s Puppet Masters: I can’t be the only one watching this mess and thinking “I wonder if the UFO has landed at Pass Christian yet?”
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