November 2024 – Outsider Insight

And the Eclipse of American Exceptionalism

It’s time to ask if the surprise outcome of the 2024 US Presidential Election reflects a growing rift between different factions within the technocratic elite or if it’s only a psyop to engineer a low-level civil war between rednecks and cosmopolitan Americans. Many still believe Trump, with Robert F Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard in his team, will rein in the Deep State and put the interests of ordinary Americans first before the grandiose nation-destroying plans of the woke illiberal intelligentsia. Others, especially on this side of the big pond, believe Elon Musk bought the election and will use the second Trump Presidency to abolish democracy. This is odd because both Elon Musk and RFK claimed that if the Harris / Walz ticket won, this could be the end of American democracy as we knew it. Authoritarians have a habit of always accusing their adversaries of the same crimes they commit themselves. Senior figures behind Kamala’s ill-fated campaign, from John Kerry to Bill Gates himself, talked openly about overturning the first amendment to ward off the omnipresent danger of malinformation. What we are witnessing are the death throes of the American Dream of freedom and democracy, with both concepts reduced to little more than commodities.

I once believed electoral outcomes could change the balance of power. Alas we witness a mere pantomime of engineered outcomes. In 1979 many disgruntled leftwingers wondered how Maggie Thatcher could appeal to the aspiring working classes. The next year Ronald Reagan captured the imagination of the American middle classes. By the time the pendulum swung the other way and Tony Blair entered 10 Downing Street with a whopping majority, it became obvious to me he only did so because he had big business on his side. Indeed, since 1974 Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has backed the winning horse. After backing the Tories from 2010 to 2019, the Sun newspaper flipped again to back the uncharismatic Sir Keir Starmer.

Before the results of the recent 2024 US Presidential race rolled in, one thing was certain in my mind. The multi-trillion-dollar Military-Biotech Industrial Complex would not relinquish power without a fight. If the winner posed a threat to the big banks and corporations, the Deep State would move heaven and earth to prevent him or her from entering office. With Queen Kamala, they had their perfect puppet, who judging by her performance over the last four years, would do nothing to hold her string-pullers to account.

Yet despite his rhetoric about draining the swamp and his promises to clamp down on corruption in the 3-letter agencies, Donald Trump appointed Susie Wiles, a longstanding political lobbyist whose former clients included Pfizer and Big Tobacco. The self-obsessed orange man may have cold-shouldered his former neocon Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and UN ambassador, Nicki Haley, but judging by his choice of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, and Christian Zionist, Mike Huckabee, as US Ambassador to Israel, the US Deep State looks set to pivot away from direct confrontation with Russia over Ukraine and to support Israel in an all-out war with Iran. Will this make World War Three more likely as most key Middle East countries, such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt too, are now aligning in the BRICs bloc. We may well be witnessing a rift in the Western Military Industrial Complex between the neoconservative Israel-First faction and the neoliberal anti-Russian faction. Just as the US manoeuvres its way out of the Ukrainian quagmire and Vice President elect, JD Vance, threatens to stop subsidising the defence of its European NATO allies because they fail to uphold American values of free speech. Meanwhile former Dutch PM and new NATO Secretary, Mark Rutte, has threatened to expel the US from NATO if they agree a compromise with Russia to end the war over Eastern Ukraine. This may mark a shift from a US-centred world to a multipolar world with European elites now more belligerent than their American counterparts, but with only 7 weeks of his tenure to go, Biden authorised airstrikes over Russia with the UK ready to deploy its Storm Shadow missiles in an escalation that could further drain NATO’s resources.

Some pinned their hopes on Matt Gaetz, an outspoken social conservative able to speak truth to power over Mossad’s potential involvement in the mysterious death of Jeffrey Epstein, but had to stand down amid sexual misconduct allegations.

Another sign of the times is the hysterical reaction to the appointment of Robert F Kennedy Jnr as Secretary of Health and Human Services. This seemed to annoy some faux-progressive commentators much more than Trump’s electoral success. Carole Cadwalladr took to X (formerly Twitter) to call RFK not only a vaccine-denier, but a fluoride-denier (rather ironic as fluoridation is not common in continental Europe). By the Guardian journalist’s warped logic, if you demand transparency, accountability and above all, liability from multibillion-dollar corporations, you are somehow denying people the benefits of the last century of scientific advances. It turns out RFK has never opposed vaccination if it has passed the strictest safety trials. Every debate about the safety and effectiveness of the coercively administered covid shots with Fauci fans always ends with references to the polio outbreak of the mid 20th century and the dramatic decline since the late 1950s. Yet by far the biggest factor is rapid decline in infant mortality over the last 70 years has been better sanitation. Children born in the 1960s and 70s were among the healthiest in history. Lifelong disabilities or chronic illnesses reached historic lows after post-war slum clearances and urban renewal, until a curious reversal of fortunes since the late 1980s when the incidence of neurological disorders and allergies started to increase. This happened to coincide with a massive expansion in the childhood vaccine schedule, most notably for MMR, and legislation to give vaccine manufacturers blanket immunity for any injuries or deaths that can be attributed to vaccines. In most Western nations, it is up to governments to pay damages. Of course, there are many other potential causes of rising health conditions such as processed foods, additives and, possibly, exposure to electronic gadgets and radiation. While people are living longer, most adults over 30 are now on one form of regular medication or another (that’s most over 50s on statins, beta blockers and/or diabetes drugs and a growing number of middle-aged adults on psychoactive meds). However, RFK would not only have to contend with the combined might of BigTech and BigPharma, but also with Trump’s choice of Surgeon General, Dr Janette Nesheiwat, a covid vaccine evangelist. I fear other global events or manufactured scandals may prevent RFK from having much influence.

The next administration may well have to deal the collapse of the US Dollar as the world’s reserve currency. All it takes is for China and Saudi Arabia to sell off US T-Bonds (treasury bonds) if the US continues to support Israeli aggression or bombs Iran on its behalf. The US Deep State can then blame the ensuing economic meltdown on Trump and let vulture funds asset-strip the nation.

The Free Movement Pivot

Cognitive dissonance in an era of high-tech surveillance

In the ongoing debate on the sustainability of high levels of rapid migration in terms of infrastructure and social cohesion, one trend just caught my eye. All of a sudden and from some quite unexpected quarters, we hear talk of deportation, something almost unthinkable outside the fringe ethno-nationalist right until recently. In a radical departure from the old consensus that immigration has to be managed and, when economic and environmental circumstances allow, openly welcomed, mainstream opinion leaders have now started to publicly advocate reversing the last twenty odd years of rapid de-acculturation by sending home unassimilated newcomers in their midst. Bastions of social democracy and global convergence like Sweden and Denmark have changed their tune and begun to deport criminals and long-term welfare claimants with an immigrant background. My main concern has always been with destabilisation or any policy that can undermine the hard-won freedoms and way of life of settled communities to advance agendas that mainly benefit global corporations to the detriment of the little people.

By and large the concept of free movement is a good thing, but like all good things has its limitations. Should the homeless be free to set up camp in your garden or squat in your house while you’re away? Should holidaymakers be free to park their caravans in wildlife reserves or on cultivated fields? Should grown men be free to wander into women’s changing rooms? Should property developers be free to build on parks or green spaces for profit or to accommodate growing demand for affordable housing? There are obvious limits in complex societies on the extent to which we can encroach on other people’s spaces and undermine their self-determination and traditions. Most disputes over land affect less than 1% of the Earth’s total landmass where over half of the global population dwell and most of the other half live in the approximately 12.5% of land considered arable with only a tiny fraction inhabiting remote settlements scattered around the next 30% of resource-exploitable land. That leaves around 56% of the remaining terrain mostly uninhabitable or unused due to extreme conditions such as deserts, tundra or high mountains. Yet that 1% assigned to the urbanosphere is nearly as large as the combined area of France, Germany, Poland and Italy.

The same progressive opinion leaders who hailed the wonders of our interconnected humanosphere, made possible by automotive, aeronautical and cybernetic technology, now want us to scale back to a more sustainable lifestyle, but sustainable for whom? How can they simultaneously promote mass migration to the most highly developed regions of the world and greater restrictions of our freedom to travel around our own neck of the woods? The same big businesses that sold us the dream of carefree motoring, suburban houses and regular holidays abroad, are now selling us smart green technology as millions of middle-class Westerners adapt to a minimalist lifestyle. Historically people have emigrated to find a better quality of life, but with the civilisational decline of the once affluent West that may no longer be the case. Sooner or later, something has to give in the clash between autochthons and international commuters. The mercantile classes behind the 18^th and 19^th century expansion of European empires have evolved into a network of global technocrats who owe no allegiance to their home countries. They have already pivoted from favouring the Western middle classes in the era of mass consumption to exploiting a vast pool of aspirational migrant labour in the shift from a mixed high-wage and high-skill economy to controlled subsistence micromanaged by tech multinationals. However, if they can pivot once for strategic reasons, they can pivot again and abandon new groups of commoners.

Just as the business elites have betrayed the Western working classes, they can easily ditch their army of globetrotting contingent workers to favour only a much smaller coterie of top-tier engineers and social governance analysts. However, at the dawn of the AI revolution with the transfer of power to a handful of tech giants, we are also witnessing the demise of the global superpower that has dominated the world’s cultural landscape for the best part of a century and reached its pinnacle in the early 1990s after the fall of the former Soviet Union.

The recent Russian occupation of Eastern Ukraine marked a turning point in the balance power between G7-centred international community and the now expanded BRICS bloc, which is in the process of setting up a rival international banking system. Before 2020 the world seemed set on a trajectory of convergence with Africa, China, India and South America all falling within orbit of US-founded tech giants and banking cartels. While the Western middle classes would lose their relative privileges, the emerging technocracy would remain unipolar. Indeed, many critics of a one-world government saw the tech censorship of the lockdown years as a shift towards a more Chinese style of global governance. While the big nations of the Global East and South may have many authoritarian traits, they have not succumbed to woke ideology. The transgender craze with its assault on natural procreation has failed to make inroads in most of Asia, the Middle East and Africa. White guilt has only infected countries with a recent history of colonialism or racial segregation. On current trends, we may soon wonder how long Africans will want to move to Europe or North America.

The whole progressive rationale for mass migration hinged on the challenges of an ageing population with a low birth rate as a means to increase the tax base and allegedly to pay for our pensions. Alas with net migration running at 750,000 a year, the establishment has stopped pretending most newcomers are high-income professionals. The cost of accommodating asylum seekers alone amounted to a staggering 5.4 billion in 2023, while new projections show the average newcomer to the UK will cost the treasury much more in their lifetime than they pay in taxes. If the AI revolution displaces most lower and medium-skilled workers leaving only core competency workers (an upper crust of well-remunerated engineers, scientists, doctors, policy consultants and administrators) as essential workers outside the UBI control grid, there will no longer be any need to import cheap labour or boost the economy artificially through greater aggregate consumer demand.

As we shift from a skills-based consumer economy, affording ordinary workers greater personal freedoms, to a more eco-compliance-driven economy, local governance teams will want to restrict people’s freedom of movement by limiting access to cars, long-distance trains and aeroplanes as we saw in the covid-scare years. The trick is to get everyone within the same control grid, which is much more pervasive in the more developed regions of the world.

We are at a critical juncture in human civilisation. A major geopolitical shift away from the US-centred world order is coinciding with the growing concentration of power in billionaire technotarians who advocate high-tech eugenics and view the masses as little more than zoo animals. Alas I see a split in our technocratic masters. Some are still hedging their bets on the survival of American exceptionalism and mass consumerism. Others are content to adopt the Chinese model of epistocracy with a vanguard group of social scientists manufacturing consent among a pacified populace. Both groups exploit our conflicting desires for free movement and social cohesion to continue to divide and rule. They can pose on the left or on the right. They can advocate open borders or mass deportations, but the end game is still total surveillance.