Glad I’m Not A Conspiracy Theorist

Scrolling around before bed, I saw that the Washington Post, the Imperial Capital’s hometown newspaper, is going all out to signal who the State believes to be its enemies, and what things should be done to them. These two pieces caught my eye, because they reminded me of things I read in the Washington Post in 2002 and 2003, explaining why we had no choice but to go to war with Iraq to defend and advance democracy.

See, I cannot stand the January 6 rioters, and think they all deserve strong punishment. I’ve even taken the unpopular position on the Right that Ashli Babbitt is responsible for her own tragic death by her foolish actions committed in the process of sacking the Capitol. I think we on the Right have some pretty crazy people, as I wrote last year, and I don’t want them getting anywhere near power. If genuinely bad people — neo-Nazis, for example — are in the ranks of the US military, they need to be expelled.

But.

Having allowed myself to be spun once before into supporting an unjust war that the Washington Establishment wanted, I hope I have learned a little something about how war propaganda works, and how the Establishment manufactures consent for what it wants to achieve. And that’s what I saw tonight in the Washington Post.

First, here’s liberal columnist Dana Milbank quoting from a CIA adviser’s new book warning that America is closer to civil war than people think. Excerpts:

She lays out the argument in detail in her must-read book, “How Civil Wars Start,” out in January. “No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war,” she writes. But, “if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America — the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela — you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”

Oh no! Who is responsible for the threat? As if you had to ask!

Things deteriorated so dramatically under Trump, in fact, that the United States no longer technically qualifies as a democracy. Citing the Center for Systemic Peace’s “Polity” data set — the one the CIA task force has found to be most helpful in predicting instability and violence — Walter writes that the United States is now an “anocracy,” somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state.

An “anocracy.” Not even a democracy anymore. Sounds real bad. What now?

The enemies of democracy must not be allowed to prevail. We are on the doorstep of the “open insurgency” stage of civil conflict, and Walter writes that once countries cross that threshold, the CIA predicts, “sustained violence as increasingly active extremists launch attacks that involve terrorism and guerrilla warfare, including assassinations and ambushes.”

It is no exaggeration to say the survival of our country is at stake.

So a CIA academic adviser is telling a liberal columnist from the Imperial City’s hometown newspaper that the Trumpkins are lying in wait, ready to fire on Fort Sumter all over again.

I suspect we will be hearing this kind of thing a lot in the national media in the months to come. And we who say, “Hey, wait a minute — ” will be denounced as defenders of the January 6 riot, and soft on threats to Our Democracy.

The Post prepares us for the banquet of b.s. to come with a second amuse-bouche in the same day.  Here’s an op-ed by three retired generals warning that the military must prepare itself to put down a Trumpist insurrection in 2024. Excerpts:

In short: We are chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time.

To their very bones. This paragraph is big:

One of our military’s strengths is that it draws from our diverse population. It is a collection of individuals, all with different beliefs and backgrounds. But without constant maintenance, the potential for a military breakdown mirroring societal or political breakdown is very real.

Diversity is our strength, as they say. The “constant maintenance” term is code for the Great Awokening the senior military brass are pushing through the ranks. What these retired generals — who almost certainly did not write a word of this op-ed, but only agreed to put their names on it — are saying is that the Awokening must be done to keep right-wing elements from starting a civil war.

More:

All service members take an oath to protect the U.S. Constitution. But in a contested election, with loyalties split, some might follow orders from the rightful commander in chief, while others might follow the Trumpian loser. Arms might not be secured depending on who was overseeing them. Under such a scenario, it is not outlandish to say a military breakdown could lead to civil war.

In this context, with our military hobbled and divided, U.S. security would be crippled. Any one of our enemies could take advantage by launching an all-out assault on our assets or our allies.

This is starting to sound like a 1990s Hollywood movie. “In a world where…”. But they are serious. Three retired generals are sounding the alarm that white conservatives “Trumpians” in the military might betray the country and start a civil war that could turn into World War III.

I’m not kidding! Read it yourself. They are actually saying that. And then, in their to-do list for the military, to try to head off possible insurrection:

In addition, all military branches must undertake more intensive intelligence work at all installations. The goal should be to identify, isolate and remove potential mutineers; guard against efforts by propagandists who use misinformation to subvert the chain of command; and understand how that and other misinformation spreads across the ranks after it is introduced by propagandists.

If you are white and under arms at present, and this all goes down like the generals ask, you had better not let people know that you are a conservative. Better keep your political and religious views to yourself. Your fellow soldiers will have been incentivized to rat you out. And you’d better be careful about the websites you read. Anything to the right of Vox.com could trip the algorithms.

I read this Post op-ed as a trial balloon by the Washington establishment to see how successful they might be in instigating a national media freakout over the Enemy Within — a bona fide Red (State) Scare. They could eliminate all internal dissenters from the new left-wing ideological orthodoxy enforced on soldiers, sailors, and airmen by kicking them out, and convincing sympathizers to keep their heads down and their mouths shut. And all those former brothers and sisters under arms who will have been expelled? The military would have framed them as (implicit or explicit) racists and traitors — just like the Confederate scum who fired on Fort Sumter. 

Do you see what they’re doing (“they” being the Washington establishment)? Having introduced into the military, and disseminated through its capillaries, the twin poisons of Critical Race Theory and gender ideology, which cannot do other than make troops hostile towards each other, or at least mutually suspicious of each other, along racial, sexual, and political lines, now the Establishment seems to be blaming those in the military who don’t bend the knee before this ideology as bigots and traitors who just might launch World War III. Insofar as those three generals represent the views of the senior military leadership, then that bench of generals reminds me of the killer who murdered his parents then threw himself on the mercy of the court, saying he was an orphan.

Disturbed by this transparent attempt by the Post, on behalf of official Washington, to stir up hatred against dissent from the ruling ideology, I decided to check Twitter to see if there was something funny by Libs of Tik Tok, or something else diverting there. I saw this short thread by the political scientist Zach Goldberg:

1/n 53% of white liberals (48% of white Dems) think that white people should feel guilty about racial inequality pic.twitter.com/amPvoo0VJL

— Zach Goldberg (@ZachG932) December 17, 2021

And I thought: huh.

It’s almost like the senior military and civilian leadership is forcing woke indoctrination on the armed forces as a way to force out any member who refused to comply. This culling of the potential troublemakers would show the military that those remaining either agree with the ruling ideology, or are so morally weak that they care more about living by lies than jeopardizing their careers. The indoctrination can continue, and perhaps the white conservatives who loved their career more than the truth can be persuaded in time that not only are the expelled rebels evil and need killing, but also that they, the ones who stayed behind, can join the liberal white soldiers in recognizing that as carriers of racial guilt and shame, they have a special duty to take the lead in using violence to neutralize these potential right-wing guerrillas. Even if those alleged enemies of the state are their own neighbors, or even their own brothers. How can love ever win if bigots, especially religious bigots, are not crushed?

The kind of education that could create that kind of change of mind would be readings by prophetic radicals who say that the only way America can ever really be free of the legacy of the Civil War is through violence that takes care of the ideological heirs to the slavers, once and for all, making those Red States crimson with the blood of traitors.

See, this is why I’m glad I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I trust my country and its leading institutions, which almost always make the right decisions, and even if they don’t, well, they had our best interests at heart, so it would be unfair to hold them accountable. If I weren’t an upright citizen, I might think that the Deep State, especially the intelligence services, was up to something very nasty. My mind being serenely untroubled by such dyspeptic rumination, I can retire to bed now.

Meanwhile, the really based conspiracy theorists will be up all night wondering who in Washington benefits by turning Americans against each other on the basis of race. One good way to keep the heat off the backsides of generals who lost the war in Afghanistan and lied for years about it is to distract everybody with a new crusade, especially the enlisted and junior officer ranks, who had to put their lives on the line because of the Pentagon’s lies, and who might like to see Congress hold them accountable. As that one active duty service member told me earlier this year, having lost the other wars, the military is now undertaking a fight in which it believes it can prevail: the culture war.

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