Our Long National Nightmare...is Over?
What Trump Hath Wrought, and What it Means
As of this post, Donald Trump has been president of the United States for almost three weeks, and this time around, Trump and his team have come prepared to do the work of gutting the federal bureaucracy they failed to do four years ago. By all accounts, things are going swimmingly. The FBI is running scared, as is the intel community in general, and the corruption discovered in agencies like USAID has exposed what I and many others like me have known for years: namely, that the federal bureaucracies were being used by leftists elements to fund money to their activist causes, in what looks like was a coordinated effort to impose their policy preferences on the country.
That this does not sound insane (I assume it doesn’t to you, dear reader) is a sign of the times. The last twenty years plus in this country have seemed like a descent into a psychosis from which there was no escape, sort of like the ending to the film Inception. For a social and cultural conservative like me, a traditional Catholic, to watch the country go from tolerance toward gays to gay marriage to transgender everything in such a short period of time was like watching a bad horror movie. At certain points you begin to doubt your grasp of reality, so bizarre did public life seem.
It was Donald Trump’s electoral run in 2015 that began to peel back curtain which was hiding what looks like a global attempt by progressives politicians, philanthropists, NGOs, politicians, and media types to impose an alternate reality on the entire planet. And no, I don’t think that is an exaggeration. If you can do that in the United States, the most powerful country in the world, you could literally do that to the entire world, at least to a degree.
I remember first becoming interested in Twitter back then through the account of David Hines, the former Bush II admin member who worked overseas. Hines opened up a world for me I didn’t know existed, that of left wing activism. Before I started reading Hines’ account, I thought of left wing activist as lazy hippies who had too much time on their hands. Hines posts, especially his epic review of Byran Burrough’s books Days of Rage about left wing terrorist groups in the 1970s, opened my eyes to how successful leftists groups had become at manipulating institutions and infiltrating them. By that I mean the federal bureaucracies. I long knew they influenced academia, the entertainment industry and primary education. What I did not know was how successful they had been at influencing society through bureaucratic regulation and through siphoning off taxpayer money to fund their insane attempts at social engineering.
But it goes beyond that. What I learned from Hines made me realize these people were revolutionaries who learned a hard lesson in the 1960s and 70s: the people at large did not want revolution and they could not overthrow the government or big corporations. They are too powerful, and our society runs on them. They took this knowledge to heart and practiced a form entryism into all the institutions of public life, with the intent of using their power to force the revolutionary designs on the country.
And it appeared to have worked. I could see how artificial were many of the social changes that happened in the past thirty years were, how they were tied to incentives created by regulation and court decisions, but most people just saw them as natural and organic, such was the narrative control progressives exercised through media and other consciousness shaping institutions. What wrecked all this was social media, particularly Twitter. Trump got elected by appealing directly to the electorate through that platform, and Musk liberating it from the NatSec complex doomed their whole operation. They could only move society in their direction if people weren’t aware of it, and now many (not all, obviously) know this good and well. That is what the USAID revelations prove.
If like me, you grew up in the 1990s, you knew how much of public life is artificial and fake. So did everyone else. This was reflected in films like The Truman Show, Pleasantville, and of course, The Matrix, which bequeathed to discourse of the online the language of “pills” (red, blue, black, white) to describe their state of mind. We all knew our lives were being curated in ways that we could not exactly describe, but you thought they were relatively benign, neutral, and not the expression of someone’s design, at least, not one malevolent in intention. That is pretty much how I have felt for the better part of ten years or more. And to have that finally confirmed publicly, and to know that this might be the end of this malevolent design, is like having a great rock dropped on top of you, which just at the point it would crush your body and end your life, suddenly lifted up and placed aside.
And yet…those progressives were so close to achieving their goals. They have been caught, and this punctures their power—for now. But one thing is certain, the power they amassed was immense, and having shown that it can be done makes me think someone will try again. The growth of AI, the effect of things like smartphones on us, all the myriad problems that we face, none of these are changed by the thwarting of this conspiracy. And there is no guarantee that it will not happen again. Of course, even given the fantastic nature of what these activists attempted and achieved, the real problems run much deeper than this, much deeper than activism and politics. They are ultimately spiritual and religious in nature, and cannot be rectified by D.O.G.E. or genius tech billionaires.
No, a reckoning with those questions is coming one way or another. And those progressive activists might just have pushed things too far for the country to completely recover. There is no way of knowing in the midst of history as it plays out. But there is more immediate hope of doing so than there was before, a greater sense that the future is not being determined by unseen and uncontrollable human forces (I speak not of spiritual ones, which are always at play) but by our own actions. And that will probably be Trump’s greatest legacy, that he punctured the curated reality that kept us in its grip for so long. That part of the nightmare, at least for now, really is over.