Trumpism and anti-Trumpism are false decoy revolutions

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE

There is a fool narrative  circulating by “MAGA” circles right now that if he is re-elected, Donald Trump is going to appoint Robert F Kennedy Jr to the position of director of the CIA. This narrative has been extrapolated from some very vague comments made by Donald Trump Jr on a conservative podcast last week.

It's hilarious that anyone thinks this is going to happen, and it says a lot about how perpetually gullible and confused Trump supporters are. Trump's CIA directors have been Mike «We lie, we cheat, we steal» Pompeo and the torture fetishist «Bloody Gina» Haspel, and these idiots think he's suddenly going to give the job to RFK Jr? Come on now. Trump is not going to drain the swamp. trump es the swamp

To this day, even after seeing four years of evidence to the contrary, Trump supporters continue to believe that he will end the wars, drain the swamp, and take the fight to the Deep State. They believe he will fight the Deep State even after imprison Assange. They believe it will end wars, even after increased cold war aggression against Russia, killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans with hunger sanctions, vetoed attempts to save Yemen of the US-backed genocide, worked to foment civil war in Iran using hunger sanctions y CIA operations to the stated objective to effect a regime change, he was on the verge of start a full scale war with Iran assassinating General Qassem Soleimani, occupied the Syrian oil fields with the aim of preventing the reconstruction of Syria, increased enormously the number of troops in the Middle East and elsewhere, increased enormouslyespecially the number of bombs dropped per day with respect to the previous administration, killing a record number of civilians, and reduced military responsibility for those air strikes. They believe that the swamp will drain after having filled his cabinet of neoconservative monsters like John Bolton and Elliott Abrams.

Trump supporters are the most gullible people on earth. They will stare at you when you look them in the eye and show them that you lied to them in broad daylight, and then they will sign for you to do it again.

Right-wingers dissatisfied with the American political status quo have been pushed to support a politician who embodies that status quo as much as any other president, mistakenly thinking that they are fighting a battle against the establishment in doing so. And this is reflected on the other side of the imagined partisan divide in American politics, with people making entire identities out of disdain for Donald Trump and acting as if this makes them brave revolutionaries.

When Trump was first elected, he hoped that Democrats who had fallen asleep at the wheel under Obama would reengage politically and begin criticizing the ills of the American empire as they did during the Bush years. But what really happened was that even though Democrats started paying attention to politics again, they were corralled like cattle by the media to oppose things that had no bearing on the real realities of the American empire and how it works in the world. world.

Instead of focusing on Trump's many depravities listed above, Democrats ended up spending years screaming about a completely false conspiracy theory that the executive branch of the US government had been taken over by the Kremlin, only to lose interest and pretend nothing happened after the Mueller investigation failed to indict a single American about any involvement with Russia. They spent all their political energy freaking out about Trump's mean-spirited tweets and how rude he was to members of the press, while ignoring or even praised the reckless warmongering and tyranny of his administration throughout the world.

So Trump has become the central figure in American politics around which everything revolves, and whether those who support him or those who oppose him win the elections, the imperial status quo is guaranteed not to change. As Americans grow increasingly dissatisfied with the abusive nature of their nation's government, a man has emerged who leads both Democrats and Republicans to believe that the best way to hit him is to adopt a highly emotional position, either for or against him. When in reality, whether he wins or loses couldn't matter less to those who have the real power.

Trump sucks all the oxygen out of the room for real speech about real things. Under Biden we have at least seen real opposition to real things like US-backed atrocities in Gaza, but under Trump it has been four years of both dominant political factions shouting about made-up nonsense under the illusion that they were fighting the power.

And that's all mainstream electoral politics in the American empire is: a fake revolution, a decoy staged for the public every few years so they don't have a real one. A symbolic ceremony in which the public pretends to throw the abusive status quo into the sea to feel that they have won the battle against their oppressors. And then their oppressors continue to oppress them.

Every few years, the public has to choose between two reliable lackeys of the oligarchic empire, and then all the ills of that empire are heaped on the winner. The public then directs their anger against the lackey rather than the real power structure that has been oppressing him, after which another election is held to get rid of the scoundrel once and for all. They hug, they cry, they celebrate, and the machine of oppression continues completely uninterrupted.

As Gore Vidal once said:

"It doesn't really matter whether the President is Republican or Democrat. The genius of the American ruling class is that it has been able to make people believe that it has had something to do with the election of presidents for 200 years, when it has had absolutely nothing to say about the candidates or the policies or the way where the country is headed. "A very small group controls almost everything."

That small group is the plutocratic class, whose machinery legalized bribery and propaganda has an immense influence on American politics, as does the imperial war machine and special interest groups with which the plutocratic class is allied. It is necessary to train support coalitions within that power group if one wants to become president in the managed democracy which is the United States, and no part of that power group is going to support a president who does not reliably advance the interests of the oligarchic empire.

From this point of view, the oligarchic power group is essentially taking on its own employees and making them promise to end the injustices that are inextricably built into the oligarchic empire. Americans live in a totalitarian state whose most important elections are rigged from top to bottom, and they are fed news about evil dictators in others countries that rig their elections to stay in power.

Politicians cannot change the status quo to one that benefits ordinary people rather than their oligarchic owners, because the oligarchic empire is built on the need for endless war, poverty and oppression. You can't have a unipolar world empire without using violent force (and the threat of using it) to maintain that world order, and you can't have a plutocracy without ensuring that a few rulers have much more control of wealth than the citizenry of. walking.

For this reason, even politicians who run on relatively progressive-sounding platforms are themselves part of the false decoy revolution unless they demand a complete dismantling of oligarchy and empire.

Politicians who present themselves as progressive in America today offer only mild opposition to some aspects of empire and oligarchy; in effect, they simply support an oligarchic empire that gives Americans healthcare. Since keeping Americans poor, busy, and propagandized is an essential dynamic at the center of a world-spanning oligarchic empire, this is a nonsensical stance; Oligarchs don't want ordinary Americans to have money to burn on campaign donations and free time to investigate what's really going on in their world, because then they could meddle in the wheels of empire. A power structure built on economic injustice will never allow for economic justice.

The door to meaningful change in America through electoral politics has been closed, blocked, bolted, welded, and barricaded with a metric ton of solid steel. The only thing that can end oppression and exploitation is the end of the oligarchic empire, and the only thing that can end the oligarchic empire is direct action by the American people: large-scale activism, national strikes and civil disobedience like the country has never seen before, in sufficient numbers to overthrow the plutocratic institutions that maintain the status quo.

The problem is that this will never happen as long as they continue to successfully propagandize Americans to be content with their false decoy revolutions. There is a zero percent chance that electoral politics will lead to the end of the empire, but a concerted effort to spread awareness of those who understand what is happening could do it.

All positive changes in human behavior are always preceded by an increase in awareness, whether it is awareness of the consequences of a person's addiction, which leads to sobriety, or an increase in awareness of injustices of racism, leading to racial justice laws.

Make people aware that the media lies to us about what is real, aware of the horrors of war, aware of the underlying dynamics of economic injustice that is crushing Americans, That It can lead to a chain reaction in which the collective uses the power of its numbers to shrug off the chains of oppression as easily as you take off a heavy coat on a hot day.

What is needed is for the people to wake up to the truth. An entire empire is built on a pair of closed eyelids.

Caitlin Johnston is an Australian independent journalist, writer and poet who is supported by  her readers. Her latest book, in collaboration with Tim Foley, is Woke: A field guide for utopia preppers.