Academic Agent on BLM Antivaxers
I am not familiar with this scholar, nor have I read the authors from whom he takes his themes, namely, C.A. Bond and Bertrand de Jouvenel.
However, I recognizes certain themes from De Tocqueville and Montaigne, particularly the eternal power between an alliance of royalty and commoners against nobles, which may be generalized to include modern equivalents: the elite and the dispossessed against the middle class.
Here, Academic Agent uses a different terminology, but the referents seem largely the same.
In this vid, he is explaining the smothering radio silence that descended upon the Black Lives Matter movement the moment it publicly opposed China Virus injection mandates.
He also shows a clip from an interview between the boxing star Cassius Clay (later called Mohammed Ali) and Michael Parkinson of the BBC. It starts at about 6.24.
(An aside: I do not call the injection “a vaccine” out of respect for clarity. A vaccine provokes the body’s immune response by introducing a nonlethal variant of the disease. This injects messenger-RNA strands into the body to instructs cells to create a SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which provokes the immune response. Contrary to what the Orwellian-named so-called fact checkers say, RNA therapy is genetic therapy, not vaccination.)
Academic Agent points out that Black Lives Matter’s defection from the party line went unreported and ignored. In one single hour they fell into the memory hole oblivion from their highmost perch of power as the most influential social movement in the nation, able to force national sports teams and international corporations to bow the knee; and able to compel mobs and lawmakers to tear down monuments and erect others, rename streets, and paint murals in honor of their gangland pantheon of victimology.
This sudden loss of influence is no doubt troubling and confusing who regarded BLM as authentically popular and spontaneous, a grassroots movement, rather than on-command theatrical fakery, orchestrated by the central establishment elite, an astroturf movement.
Speaking for myself, I have often been troubled and confused by the nameless and paradoxical nature of the Enemy, for the movement will change its name every decade or so, and since the various elements of the Enemy camp combine and merge to form a chimera. Academic Agent’s remarks shed some light on this perennial puzzle of mine.
The movement, in this generation, consists of combined leftwing and rightwing elements, plutocratic socialists, totalitarian anarchists, gnostic agnostics; secularist jihadists, racist anti-racists, brownshirt anti-fascists, and pervertarians of puritanical severity.
The political factions in the USA form a uniparty which only play-acts at mutual opposition; globalist multinational corporations and social media oligarchs cooperate with ‘Occupy Wall Street’ rioters and socialist revolutionaries to protest their own businesses and banks; their intellectuals both pretend to be ‘woke’ to a secret knowledge unshared by others, the truth that there is no truth; meanwhile their secularist press supports, defends, and applauds the enormities of Mohammedan holy war; the racist anti-racists are BLM; the brownshirt anti-fascists are Antifas; the feminists LQBTWFT&c are puritanical in their demands that the ‘male gaze’ never light upon immodestly dressed women, and tht models and actresses be ugly, actresses be called actors, while at the same time applauding all sexual perversions a sick soul can invent, so that schoolchildren be groomed for pederasty by sodomites.
And the harlot queen riding the back of this many-headed many-crowned beast is, of course, the Fake News, whom none can question without being banned from social media.
As mentioned above, the philosophy of Montaigne, and, one presumes, of C.A. Bond and Bertrand de Jouvenel as well, predicts an eternal power struggle of the elite power of society, in any society, to maintain and expand itself, in one of two forms: the first is by combining with the lower ranks against the middle; and second by combining with the middle against the lower.
We might, in the spirit of drollery, call the first alliance whig, from an old slang for horsethief; and the second tory, a word meaning highwayman. Those who regard American politics as more dignified should reflect that the traditional symbols for our political parties, the Jackass and the Elephant were selected by political cartoonists as images of a stubborn fool and a clumsy if warlike behemoth. (This was in the day that “Seeing the Elephant” was a euphemism for surviving the bloodshed of the Civil War.)
With the loss of prestige of monarchy, modern history holds many examples of the lower aiding the middle against the elite. In one rare case, this was done to establish a republic; in all other cases, this was done to establish a despotic regimes juntas, socialist unions or Napoleonic empires falsely called republics, and falsely ruled in the name of the people. The elite of the ancient regimes, with trivial exceptions, have been consigned to history. Over time the sad result has been that the uppermost of the middle becomes a new elite.
This new elite, at least in the United States, has a mercantile character rather than military, and like the mandarins of old, its membership is based on education and attachment, not a right of birth. The new elite are men sporting silk top hats rather than gold coronets, and consists of figures of wealth and fame, robber barons promising well-paying work, newspaper moguls mesmerizing millions, or demagogues promising equality, revenge, utopia.
In a free market, by their decisions of buying and selling, the commoners retain a communal control over wages and prices, but the eternal (and sometimes merited) enmity of the commons against their rich employers and benefactors, eternally invites regulation, hence regulatory capture. Well-meant and ill-conceived attempts to hinder monopoly create monopoly.
Thus, in America, hoisted aloft by liberal and populist rhetoric promising New Deals and Great Societies, Free Trade and Fair Trade and the Progressive Taxation to benefit the commoners, the elite become entrenched and unchallengeable.
The “semi-socialist” or “regulated” economy by definition malinvests goods and services, since regulation by fiat takes resources away from priorities where the consumers collectively would have preferred, and into priorities serving social or political ends, either high-minded or venal. We are not talking here about laws to enforce contracts or deter fraud or negligence. We mean wage and price controls, and specific regulation of hour and working conditions, outputs manufactured, resources used.
This malinvestment creates artificial scarcity and artificial waste, and the natural marketplace incentives to deter waste and alleviate scarcity require additional regulations in order to correct.
One example of myriads must suffice: during the Oil Crisis of 1970s, the federal government unwisely imposed strict rationing on gasoline and heating oil but, less stringent controls on diesel. Before rationing, prices of gasoline and heating oil fluctuated seasonally, as consumers prioritized on heating homes in the winter. These price fluctuations gave refiners the incentive to shift production of crude oil from gasoline to heating oil in winter.
Unfortunately, the rationing prevented price shifts. The priorities of consumers remained the same, but they could not legally offer more money for the type of fuel they wanted. It was prevented by law. The oil companies had no incentive to increase heating oil production in winter. Gasoline supplies were plentiful while heating oil supplies were scarce. Eventually fuel oil customers started burning diesel fuel in spite of its higher price. Diesel fuel, which is chemically identical to heating oil, was under the less stringent price controls.
Oil companies shifted production to diesel fuel, which now was more profitable, and gasoline grew scarce. Since the price was controlled, the consumers were now paying the same amount of money but receiving fewer gallons to distribute to the gas stations.
Since the point of the initial rationing was to increase supply to customers, when the policy proved counterproductive, the government either had to abandon it or had to increase the price controls to cover diesel as well.
This was done, and led to further dislocations, shortages, and malinvestments. To correct for these, import versus domestic oil controls were introduced, and separate regulations for inland refineries versus coastal, dollar exchanges versus offsets, independent versus leased, large versus small, and in far more complexity than even an archangel could track.
The long list of additional controls, regulations, taxes, quotas, offsets, price freezes, and so on would drive a man mad to recite in detail, but these regulations were necessitated by the unwillingness to abandoned counterproductive policies.
Abandoning counterproductive policy would have meant Caesar decreasing his own power and asking his pet intellectuals to abandoning their deep-rooted demonic hatred of the free market. This hatred has no source and no point. It seems nigh-ubiquitous, and darkens and cripples the souls of all scholars, pundits, and bookish men.
However, this hatred, whatever its source, is immensely useful to Caesar, for it allows him to set his pet intellectuals to fill newspaper and schoolyards and convince the common man that the rich are his enemies. It also allows Caesar to commit incest with the rich, form permanent alliances of mutual bribery and mutual coercion, as the manufacturers combine and possess the institutions meant to police them. Since the same families haunt the board of directors of these corporations as sit in the halls of power either as lawmakers or lobbyists.
The upstarts and start ups, the middle class, and small businessmen, are the silenced victims of this corrupt system, since the plutocrats sculpt the regulations to suit themselves, run the newspapers, and donate to the candidate coffers of their creatures and relatives. Even if a rogue politician is elected to high office by some hiccough of unexpected popularity or self-funding, the permanent civil service, CIA and FBI and military and all the apparatus if the “Deep State” will arrange, by hook or crook, to hinder, cripple, undermine, frighten, or impeach him. If worse comes to worse, there is always voter fraud.
Thus we reach the modern situation, where the whigs and tories, horsethieves and highwaymen, normally and naturally at odds, have found such accommodation with each other, that they have become a new thing, a globalist of the New World Order, who rules and resigns in the name of the people, but without their consultation or consent.
But the whole of the demonic hatred of the scholar toward the tradesman is based on a falsehood, for it necessitates mischaracterizing each failure of Caesar’s counterproductive policies to be due to the malice of sabotage, wreckers, or the greed of businessmen, or some other farfetched scapegoat. Since no normal man of normal moral character would be driven to break laws merely in order to impoverish the poor or deprive them of necessities, the scapegoat must be accused of diabolical cruelty and evil, a lack of humanity, or an absence of patriotism.
Historically, the Jews, who are at home in no European nation, never fully assimilated, can always be routinely accused of being controlled by unpatriotic impulses. Their unique role in banking, to which Christian prohibitions on usury in olden days made lucrative to them, leads verisimilitude to the accusation, rightly or wrongly. Sadly, both the ubiquity of antisemitism among intellectuals, and the tendency of Jewish wrongdoers (read, Soros) to deflect criticism by accusing their accusers of it, erects such a smokescreen of ill-will that the truth is unclear.
However, the Chosen People can also serve as an example of the dynamic of the Elite and their typical operation. Fearful of popular fury, the Jews typically support and are supported by strong central governments, which government then has at hand a sure-fire scapegoat to blame once its counterproductive policies achieve the opposite of the promised effects.
Other despised or disenfranchised groups, such as gangsters, minorities, immigrants, or penniless student intellectuals and agitators can be gathered almost at will, and suddenly presented with publicity and funding to work evil upon whatever scapegoat is fashionable to blame that season, real or imaginary. The witchhunters can always find a patriarchy, a cabal of capitalists, or systemic white racism, or traces of global warming, which the eyes of ordinary mortals cannot detect, and the control of the public discourse allows the establishment to humiliate and silence any child who claims not to see the emperor’s new clothing, or the persecute and ban the speech of anyone unconvinced by Chicken Little’s latest fashion in hysteria.
But the whole apparatus of power is based on falsehood and betrayal, because the gangsters or minorities, once induced to riot, are discarded with shocking swiftness once proven no longer useful.
The elite are not themselves anarchists nor perverts nor socialists nor jihadists, but they shower money, attention, and applause on any of these groups and any of their spokesmen as convenient.
The groups may or may not attempt to bite the hand that feed them, but in either case, it does not matter. The elite are immune from what such attack dogs can do. Their riots damage the middle class, the Christian, the suburban family man, and most of all the Church and the social norms that spring from Western tradition and Church teaching. It was not the mansion of the Bush dynasty nor the Kennedy nor the Clinton, nor was it Pederasty Island nor Martha Vineyard that went up in flames, nor any New York publisher nor Hollywood panderer. Instead minority-owned small businesses and franchises, a Starbucks, a Wendys, or local bars or car dealerships were destroyed, to the tune of two and three million dollars locally, more than that nationwide.
And any laws and regulations promulgated to appease the mob, are, of course, counterproductive (see results of defunding the police, federalizing education, or expanding welfare programs), and, of course, increase the power of the Elite while further weakening and demoralizing the Middle Class.
I am unsurprised that Academic Agent identifies the same centers of power as did I in a series of essays gathered under the name The Last Crusade: namely, the press and Hollywood, Town Hall, Wall Street, the Academy, the pundits, and the Church. He is right to condemn as an enemy the one power center I did not specifically address, the standing army. They have been politicized and corrupted, as is now clear from their lawless behavior, and cannot be trusted.
In this video is no mention of a proposed solution, which is to form an alliance with the dispossessed ourselves. This philosophy is called Populism, and it has always been hated by the globalists on the Left and by free-trade advocates on the Right.
Its prime example in the current day is Trump’s appeal to the dispossessed among blacks and minorities, union men and blue collar workers hitherto slavishly devoted to the Democrat Party: What the Hell Do you Have to Lose?
The press will not report nor glamorize the historical record-breaking decrease of unemployment among blacks, or their rising wages, now sharply curtailed by inflation and injection-mandated mass firings. The anger of union workers in coal and energy sectors unemployed at the stroke of a senile pen by the current occupier of the Oval Office also goes unmentioned.
I said above that alliance between the middle and low against the elite to establish a true republic was rare. Indeed, I can think of no other example in history but one: the conservative revolution by wealthy land-owners in the American colonies, along with tradesmen, farmers, sailors, and common folk, against the nobly born lords and royalty of far off England. It was more of a spiritual revolution than a political one, for it did not slay King George on his throne, but destroyed even the prestige, appeal, and intellectual justification of the concept of rule by birth, noble or royal, first in America, then in many lands.
This is the model to imitate.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
