I was stumble-bumming through Bertrand de Jouvenel’s On Power reading first about how back in the Middle Ages kings weren’t all that powerful. Because the church and the nobles. It wasn’t until the Reformation and the absolute monarchs that the notion of the Divine Right of Kings got going. Now, of course, we have the Divine Right of The People. Yeah, back then the King was the Sovereign, and now it’s The People.
The thing that frosts me in de Jouvenel’s analysis is this notion of the Sovereign. I don’t like it, not one bit. I guess in Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt the sovereign is the guy that gets to decide the “state of exception” when the laws are overridden in the present emergency. I don’t like no stinkin’ sovereign sending my grandsons off to another darn war.
In the middle of it all I got to watch Tucker Carlson and Naomi Wolf discuss the late COVID unpleasantness. Yeah. Naomi Wolf, the tippy-top liberal, got deplatformed because she questioned the lockdowns and the vaxx. Tucker and Naomi were both outraged at the government lies during COVID. Naomi:
You know, everyone was lying at that point from the top down. The CDC was implying or stating that vaccination stops infection. Rachel Maddow said that, you know, the virus stops when you're vaccinated, as I recall. I mean, I don't have the exact words in front of me. The president was saying, if you get vaccinated, it stops the virus. All the language implied that we were the ones endangering everyone, endangering children, endangering grandma. So it's a very demonic set of lies.
See, once Naomi Wolf started challenging the Narrative she got deplatformed. Defriended by friends…
Deplatformed from Twitter, from Facebook, from YouTube, but also all the newspapers and and news outlets where I'd been a commentator or columnist for 35 years, ran pieces smearing me and saying I was, you know, spreading misinformation. And I was the anti-vaxxer… And basically I became a non-person on the left. I was kicked out overnight from my, comfortable perch, you know, in the liberal elite media.
Now, I was not scandalized by this. I thought to myself, of course. This is what happens when President Wilson joins World War I, when President Roosevelt does his Day of Infamy and joins World War II. This is what happens after 9/11 when President Bush unites the nation to go punish Iraq. How do you tell that a politician is lying? Because his lips are moving.
Evidently, I said to myself, Carlson and Wolf are telling me that the same applies when the government unites us all to fight a pandemic. There is no room for discussion; there is only one Narrative. And anyone challenging the Narrative is a traitor.
So then I looked up the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Conquest, War, Famine / Pestilence, Death. And guess what: our liberal friends want us to believe there is a Fifth Horseman. Climate Change.
So here’s my thinking.
When there’s a war, then the rulers rush to unite us all in the existential fight against the foe. And with one voice, we all go along. They know, instinctively, that this is their Thing.
When there’s a pestilence, the rulers rush to unite us all to lock down and vaxx up and “stop the spread” of the dreaded pestilence. And with one voice, we all don our masks and go along. They know, instinctively, that this is their Thing.
But whatabout racism? Sexism? Homophobia? Dead-naming? Could be that there is a bit of a cock-up on the Woke Front.
And whatabout Climate Change? You know the deal. Ever since the 1990s our global rulers have been telling us about “the next 10 years”:
The world is likely to pass a dangerous temperature threshold within the next 10 years, pushing the planet past the point of catastrophic warming — unless nations drastically transform their economies and immediately transition away from fossil fuels, according to one of the most definitive reports ever published about climate change.
But you know what I think, especially after listening to Tucker and Naomi? I think that climate change doesn’t work like war and pestilence. Especially as our leaders have been warbling about “ten years to stop the spread” for the last 30 years.
No. It’s got to be a threat right now to justify the “state of exception.”
Germany’s resumption of submarine attacks on passenger and merchant ships in 1917 became the primary motivation behind Wilson’s decision to lead the United States into World War I.
YESTERDAY, December 7, 1941 a date which will live in infamy the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.
Good evening. Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. The victims were in airplanes, or in their offices; secretaries, businessmen and women, military and federal workers; moms and dads, friends and neighbors. Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror.
My fellow Americans: Tonight, I want to speak with you about our nation’s unprecedented response to the coronavirus outbreak that started in China and is now spreading throughout the world.
The point is that instinctively, we humans go along with our president when he announces a war or a pestilence. And, I would say, per Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his doctrine of the political as the distinction between friend and enemy and therefore justifying the “state of exception” when the rules are suspended, that only war and pestilence justify the sovereign raising the war banner and crying “once more unto the breach, dear friends.”
And now I declare that anything else is not a job for government and politics, not a justification for taking money from citizens to pay for wars and troops and/or bennies for the supporters of the government. And not a job for no stinkin’ sovereign.
And I think that this is why climate change, the last best hope of the educated ruling class on Earth, is not going to be an excuse for another World War.
Why? Because the emergency has to be here, right now, with torpedoed merchant ships, or sunken battleships, or iron curtains, or burning Twin Towers, or virulent microbes.
we have created a set of global ecological crises, chief among them being climate change and a new Great Extinction, and ushered in a new geologic epoch – The Anthropocene.
it doesn’t pass the test. No torpedoed ships, or burning towers, or overwhelmed hospitals. And, before millions of people start dying from climate change there are gilets jaunes protesting in France, Dutch farmers protesting in the Netherlands, German famers protesting in Germany: ordinary people protesting the tippy-top elitists destroying their livelihoods.
Not to mention the populist nationalists popping up all over North America and Europe.
Now, let’s get started on a new movement to put government and tippy-top elitists and bureaucrats and administrators on ice except when there is an existential emergency right here right now and people are dying.