Yesterday a socialist mayor in Belgium sent the cops to shut down a conference of National Conservatives in Brussels.
The day before NY prosecutor Alvin Bragg put former President Trump on trial for alleged payment of hush money using the wrong account.
Today the US Senate voted not to hold a trial of impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
A couple of days ago Maine voted to join the Interstate Compact in which states agree to cast their Electoral College votes for the winner of the popular vote in future presidential contests. This is a Democrat initiative that is based on the idea that Democrats always win the popular vote, and the president should be elected on the national popular vote. You can see why. If you look back at recent presidential elections, Trump in 2016, Bush in 2000, both won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote. In all the other elections since 1900 the winner of the popular vote won. We wuz robbed! If you are a Democrat.
However, I think that the flap over new NPR CEO Katherine Maher’s ridiculous woke racist tweets has nothing to do with the case.
The daughter of wealthy parents whose wedding was announced in the New York Times, Maher grew up in a wealthy white suburb of New York City before studying at the American University in Cairo, the Institut français du Proche-Orient in Syria, and finally New York University.
Really, darling, what do you expect a privileged educated white woman to believe? She believes the current fashionable virtue-signaling beliefs that “people like us” always believe.
Obviously, our rulers are worried and upset. Things are not going according to plan. I think the most helpful view on this is Mike Benz’s comment to Tucker Carlson. I go through the whole conversation here.
Benz thinks that the key moment was in 2016 with Brexit in Britain and Trump’s election in the USA. The national security states here and in Europe realized that Houston We Have a Problem.
Now the entire rules based international order would collapse unless the military took control over media, because Brexit would give rise to Brexit in France with Marine Le Pen, to spexit in Spain with the Vox party, to Italy. Exit in Italy to Gregson in Germany to Grexit in Greece.
I suppose all educated people in the tippy-top Elite 1% — like NPR’s Katherine Maher — get completely flummoxed when the world changes. And it doesn’t hurt that they all believe that nationalism equals Nazism equals literally Hitler, and the genocide of the Jews and a world war.
Why would you tippy-tops believe that?
What do you mean, peasant! Everybody knows that!
Frankly, I don’t have a clue what is coming. But I do believe that
Populist nationalism catering to the ordinary middle class has been building over the last 50 years. In the US at least since Nixon.
Unlike the Age of the Educated Class, which was all about the ideology, populist nationalism is organic. It doesn’t know what it is, and it doesn’t know where it is going.
I don’t think that the populist nationalist states will get into a war with each other, despite the fears of Literally Hitler in the tippy-top Elite 1%.
The endless enthusiasm in the tippy-top Elite 1% for full social mobilization, — for climate change, systemic racism, regulation, large-scale migration — is going to come a cropper, economically, sooner rather than later.
The big challenge for populist nationalism will be the We are the One and Only political culture that is the heritage of Russia, of China, and of Islam.
But do you know what I think?
I think that it isn’t going to matter whether they Get Trump. Or whether they close down Conservative Nationalist conferences. Or whether they refuse to get a handle on immigration. Or whether they fix the Electoral College. Or whether NPR CEOs are entitled white women from here to eternity.
The world is changing, our noble rulers don’t like it, and there is nothing they can do to stop it.