Revolution!

Timelines are iffy, but the Western world is about to enter a new age of revolution ending in a new dark age

[R]evolutions are complex processes that emerge from the social order becoming frayed in many areas at once. There are five elements that create an unstable social equilibrium: economic or fiscal strain, alienation and opposition among the elites, widespread popular anger at injustice, a persuasive shared narrative of resistance, and favorable international relations. Revolutions have both structural and transient causes; structural causes are long-term and large-scale trends that undermine existing social institutions and relationships and transient causes are contingent events, or actions by particular individuals or groups, that reveal the impact of longer term trends and often galvanize revolutionary oppositions to take further action.¹

You will remember the “five elements that create an unstable social equilibrium:”

• Economic strain

• Alienation and opposition among the elites

• Widespread popular anger at injustice

• Persuasive shared narrative of resistance

• Favorable international relations

Now, look around and see how many of those elements are in place or emerging.

• Stagflation erodes the purchasing power of the dollar while limiting or preventing real income growth

• Elites war against each other and, especially, against the plebes

• People in the Western world have never been angrier

• The right has adopted the left’s tactic of cancellation, deplatforming, and ridicule

• The BRICS (and more) are abandoning the USD to further destabilize the “rules-based order”

Every element is either in place or emerging. But some additional things need to happen before a full-scale revolution begins. I will discuss those missing pieces in a bit.

The Burning Platform

“The US government is on a “burning platform” of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon.”

—David Walker (former Comptroller-General of the United States), 2007

Some of us saw this moment coming a long time ago—before the financial collapse and the Tea Party. And things have gotten much worse.

Commenting yesterday on Walker’s 2007 warning (in his book Comeback America: Turning the Country Around and Restoring Fiscal Responsibility), Jim Quinn, author at The Burning Platform, wrote:

It’s almost humorous Walker was issuing these dire warnings when the 2007 annual deficit was $160 billion. At our current rate of debt accumulation, it takes only one month to reach $160 billion. In 2020 and 2021 it only took 20 days to accumulate $160 billion. The national debt in 2007 was $9 trillion, up from $5.6 trillion in 2000. Today it stands at $31.8 trillion. Interest on the national debt will approach $900 billion this year, exceeding defense spending.

Quinn’s piece provides a perfect backdrop for the coming revolution. It describes the Sodom and Gomorrah levels of depravity that have become the norm in America. It tries to explain our financial insolvency (which is truly indescribable), and it warns of a Dark Age that will follow America’s collapse. You should read it.

But two other stories from the past two days triggered this post. First, Victor Davis Hanson wrote about the right’s newfound ability to stick with boycotts. Then, Michael Snyder (The Economic Collapse) described the incredible amount of suffering in America today.

The Lion Is Clearing His Throat

Victor Davis Hanson, in just a few short paragraphs, explains exactly why the Tea Party movement shocked the nation in 2009 and 2010. Please read closely the following from his article, Is the Sleeping Conservative Dragon Finally Waking Up?

Traditionalists often feel they have no time for politics. They prefer to focus on their families, jobs, communities, and churches. Until recently they shunned organized boycotts. They abhor massing outside the homes of left-wing politicians and judges.

They shrug and concede that universities, teachers, government unions, the corporate boardroom, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the media, entertainment, and professional sports are hopelessly activist and left-wing.

The environmental, social, governance (ESG), diversity, equity, and inclusion, and LGBQT+ agendas were unfathomable acronyms to Middle America and thus mostly ignored.

So conservatives often slept through the woke revolution.

In 2009, successive waves of bailouts for the very people who caused the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression temporarily moved the sleep right to action. We massed outside the homes of the Carnahans in St. Louis. We massed outside the offices of Senator Claire McCaskill. We stepped away from families, jobs, communities, and churches to save the country.

But, as I said in several early interviews during that period, we had no intention of making activism or politics a permanent part of our lives. Rather, we intended to put things right and go back to “listening to the ball game with a beer on my deck.” A system that requires constant vigilance and intervention is broken. Our rights are enshrined in the Constitution and law, and we elect representatives to safeguard those rights. If we must all abandon family, work, community, and church to keep the republic, then a republic must be too fragile an object. The idea of freedom and good government is precisely to free men to pursue happiness. Were we each required to participate personally in every decision, we would have a direct democracy.

So, once we succeeded in ridding the country of Obama, we largely returned to our apolitical lives. The Tea Party, which won the favor of Americans in 2009, was already becoming an annoyance to most people by 2014, so continuing our initial level of action would likely have yielded negative returns, anyway. As Saul Alinsky warned in Rules for Radicals, “a tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.”

According to Hanson, though, that flames of ‘09 have received a stiff wind of fresh oxygen by wokism.

Yet suddenly they realize their apathy allowed the country to descend into something the nation’s founders never imagined or intended, and antithetical to what most knew as America just a couple of decades ago.

So conservatives are awakening from their slumber. And they are discovering that they too can boycott, agitate—and roar.

I will extend VDH’s remarks with this: will the right tolerate a repeat of the 2016 to 2020 experience? Would the election of a Republican president and Congress return us to our dens to sip whiskey and watch hockey?

Or, having now been roused twice in little more than a decade, are we ready to question anew whether or not a republic can withstand the ramparts of a left bent on its destruction? Are we willing to abandon God and family for country in order to achieve an uneasy stalemate with the enemies of liberty? In short, are we willing to abandon God and family for the sake of country?

Hanson sees the rise of the right continuing, as he concludes:

But the Left does not enjoy majority public support. And now it has managed the impossible—to goad the normally comatose conservative dragon to awaken.

And it is just starting to breathe fire.

To which I add: if the conservative dragon is awake and just beginning to breathe fire, what exactly will survive the conflagration it ignites?

Before we answer, let’s consider Michael Snyder’s piece.

The Working Homeless

Thanks to our rapidly rising cost of living, we are seeing a dramatic explosion in the number of “working homeless” that are living out of their vehicles on a daily basis even though they are currently employed.

—Michael Snyder, The Suffering is Off the Charts, Economic Collapse

Snyder refers to “RV communities” and other emerging homeless camps populated, not by drug-addicts with mental disorders, but by middle class, working people. They’ve been forced to abandon their apartments and homes to take up residence in campers, tents, and RVs. They work—some in hospitals and large corporations—but stagflation prevents them living like a working person.

And their numbers are growing exponentially.

Were the year 1987 and Reagan the president, this phenomenon would lead every evening news broadcast and be the topic of every Sunday morning talk show. But we had a free, if liberal, press back then. Today, the press is the elite. Only fringe sites like this one discuss actual human events.

Snyder points out what everyone knows: things will get worse before they completely collapse. No one in his right mind actually expects things to improve.

In any event, whatever happens in Washington is not going to fundamentally alter our long-term trajectory, and that means that much more suffering is coming in the days ahead.

Snyder does not venture to guess what that suffering will look like or what the consequences of so many educated working people suffering despite “working hard and playing by the rules,” as Bill Clinton aptly described the lives of most Americans. Snyder does, however, warn us that we are only one Biden stumble away from living out of a used RV. As with the trend of conservatives breathing fire, the trend of a homeless middle class is only getting started.

How Much Will We Take?

The two articles report events that fulfill four of the five prerequisites to revolution. Those are: financial crisis, mutual hatred between the people and the elites, anger over injustice, and a fresh but growing narrative of resistance, thanks to Bud Light, Target, Major League Baseball, and many other woke brands.

Meanwhile, other indicators show the geopolitical landscape makes conditions ripe for revolt as the world moves away from the US dollar as quickly as it can. And that move is malicious. The countries leading the flight from the dollar want to see America get its comeuppance.

Peter St. Onge recently outlined on the Mises Institute what the fall of the USD would mean:

Now, here’s the problem. What if foreigners suddenly don’t want dollars?

Maybe China’s paying them to sell oil in yuan, or maybe the Fed lost the plot and creates too much inflation.

Demand dries up, the dollar starts to lose value, and foreigners start [to] worry their life savings and corporate treasuries are melting. They sell out of the dollar. A little at first, more and more if it accelerates.

Now that river to foreigners reverses, it flows back into the reservoir. The dollar collapses. 70 years of Fed and Wall Street money printing comes rushing back like a tsunami running up a canyon. We’re talking double-digital inflation, over multiple years, at a minimum.

If they screw this up, reserve currency status could turn out to be a trap, an absolute catastrophe for the American people.

Remember, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa want the US to weaken. They are creating new banks of international settlement to allow themselves and other non-Western nations to trade in currencies other than the USD. They also want US military strength reduced.

Most importantly, Saudi Arabia, co-creator of the petrodollar, has also moved on from that 1973 agreement. The Saudis now accept non-USD currencies in exchange for oil. Which means they now have options besides US Treasuries to invest their profits.

"The only enemy more dangerous than a man with unlimited resources, is one with nothing to lose."

— Chuck Rhoades (Billions)

This means 5 of the 5 conditions necessary for revolution are advancing or already in place. And the 5 create a vicious cycle:

• US deviancy in the form of wokeness offends just about all non-Western countries, Russia and Saudi Arabia in particular. This increases their desire to see the US fall.

• The global flight from the US dollar leads to inflation which exacerbates the economic strain on both the plebes and the system itself.

• Unjust bailouts of the elites increase the anger among the plebes.

• The plebes pay less attention to the “official” narratives and more attention to “persuasive shared narrative of resistance.”

• Growing rancor among the plebes leads to crackdowns by the elites which encourages adversarial foreign powers to increase pressure on the US.

• Rinse and repeat.

At some point in the near future (though I can’t say exactly when), a trigger will push the plebes over the brink. Boycotts will turn into protests that elicit an overbearing response from the elites which draw more plebes into the streets.

What will that trigger be and will it get pulled? I don’t know. But I know the finger is squeezing tighter, not relaxing.

Remember Michael Snyder’s story about the working homeless? Those people are, now, too busy working and staying alive to protest their miserable conditions. But what happens when those decent, hardworking men and women—many raising small children—lose those jobs that keep them too busy to revolt?

Having lost their home and living in squalor and shame in a homeless encampment, the loss of their job and income will be a triggering mechanism. They’ll suddenly have the time to dwell on their circumstances. Sure, they’ll remember bad decisions they made. But they’ll also remember how they clawed back to respectability. How they landed the job, saved the money, married, bought a house or rented a nice apartment, showed up for work on good days and bad. And, while continuing to earn a paycheck—even a raise or two—they found themselves homeless. They’ll remember the day they had to tell their kids, “we’re moving.” Changing schools. Wondering how they’ll get mail and what they’ll tell their employer their new address is. But they fought through only to be told by their bosses, “we no longer have a place for you.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in May 2023, the economy added 339,000 new jobs. Every single new job went to an immigrant, legal or illegal. But it’s worse: another 30,000 jobs changed hands from Americans to foreigners. The net: 310,000 Americans lost their jobs in May, increasing unemployment to 3.7%, far above the highest expectation.

And it will only get worse.

Chances are, some of those jobs lost belonged to America’s burgeoning “working homeless” population. Well, “working” no more. Just homeless.

And, now, those folks have time to think. And talk. To each other. To others who became homeless before they became unemployed. And they’ll know why they’re in this predicament and who’s responsible.

One by one and two by two, the working homeless will realize they are men with nothing to lose. They will join with others. Having lost all trust in the country’s institutions, they will not run to the media or to their elected officials. They will turn to the only people they can trust: each other. With their peers, they will plot out a path to regaining what they’ve lost—and punish their enemies.

Hardworking, law-abiding citizens will suddenly become uncooperative and “resistant.” They will no longer help the society—they will actively and quietly subvert the system. Every system.

Their numbers will increase. Two by two will become 16 x 16, then 32 x 32, 64 x 64. One node will connect with another node, and suddenly the force will be, not 64 x 64 but 64-squared.

When 16 million angry men with nothing to lose decide to take action, the elites will panic. They will not have seen it coming. They will not have a plan except brute force.

The elites will not restrain themselves. They won’t stop to consider that, mathematically, every member of the armed forces will know intimately at least (probably more) person in any random sampling of 16 million Americans.

Among those 16 million, the old political labels mean nothing. They are neither left nor right, liberal nor conservative, Democrat nor Republican. They are simply Americans who worked hard and played by the rules and had their lives destroyed by an entitled and cruel elite that now turns guns on their victims.

Those who still have a job and a home will begin to ask, “how long before they come for us?” They’ll ask themselves first, then each other. The question will not be “if,” but “when?” And they’ll look at the numbers: two men with the mutual trust to talk to each other feel very lonely. That army of 16 million angry, homeless men will look very comforting. One by one and two by two, the working class will join the ranks of the working homeless to strip the society of its legacy institutions and commission new agencies to execute their will.

But will this “revolution” work?

Will It Be Too Late?

As I type, every keystroke—letter, number, return, space, and character—is immediately recorded and analyzed by government monitors at the National Security Agency. Computer algorithms perform thousands of calculations each second on my writing, from sentiment to keyword to word proximity. The algorithms consider my age, work and military background, income, friends, physical movement (gleaned from my cell phone and countless cameras that exist everywhere), and the entire body of my written and spoken words. They assess the “threat” my words pose to the regime. If the threat reaches a certain threshold, another algorithm triggers actions.

The actions triggered by my words could range from assigning my case to a human analyst to releasing sensitive information about me through contrived data breach. Or worse.

And, you are being similarly scrutinized as a recipient of my writing. Paid subscribers likely receive greater scrutiny than free. Non-subscribers, too, get a look-over. The algorithms consider all the other things you’ve read or written, the places you’ve gone, and the people you associate with online or in person. You have a threat assessment number, too.

Never before has human action been so minutely monitored, analyzed, and thwarted. Never before has an entity exercised such total control over every human being in its realm.

Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but MORE merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy—everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.’

—George Orwell. 1984 (Kindle Locations 4008-4021). Kindle Edition.

I wonder how many of the people who warn us that we are witnessing 1984 coming to life have really read it. Really thought about it. I wonder this because all I hear about is the surveillance part—Big Brother watching you. But we already have that, and we’ve had it for some time. At least as far back as the 1970s when Senator Frank Church warned us that the NSA and other agencies were spying on every American.

There would be no place to hide if this government ever became a tyranny. . . and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know.

—Senator Frank Church, August 17, 1975

Big Brother is almost 50 years old. We accepted without protest. In fact, following September 11, 2001, we demanded it.

No, the surveillance state is not new nor particularly frightening to most people. Most people don’t care that they are being watched. What has changed is far more sinister and dangerous.

The technology Church talked about existed to protect and defend a God-fearing people and their liberty. In 1975, America was still a nation founded, as O’Brien said, on “love or justice.” But, as I’ve written before, that nation is long gone. It has been replaced by a nation founded on hatred. “In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement,” O’Brien informed Winston in 1984.

Surveillance or not, the fact is that our society is a society of hatred, fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Just look a transsexual to see what that self-abasement looks like. Here’s Exhibit A:

This is a prisoner in Minnesota who will be given half a million dollars and transferred to a women’s prison to undergo a taxpayer-funded vaginoplasty. Be still, my beating heart. (More at The Gateway Pundit.)

And, what about snatching children out of the womb? Well, public school teachers admit that, once you send your kid to school, his their property and you relinquish all rights. More and more, the courts and the law agree.

If you were to hook up 1,000 typical Americans to monitors that interpret a person’s emotional sentiment (and they exist), you would find most people desire the world O’Brien describes in the passage above. A large minority would demonstrate negative emotions, and only a tiny fraction would show true repulsion and fear at the thought of such a world. Will that fraction increase enough, soon enough, to stave off what is coming?

If you were hoping Trump’s triumphant return would fix everything, you will be disappointed. Trump will be in jail soon.

Is your hope in DeSantis? Well, if DeSantis would actually work to reverse the country’s descent into maelström, he won’t be president. The mechanisms to control the outcome of the election are still in place. No state, no county, has taken serious steps to erase the fake ballot machine. No one but a handful of us Magadonians gives a rats ass that the USPS has pretty much admitted it helped rigged the elections in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2020, via Gateway Pundit:

The Amistad Project said that they have sworn declarations that state over 300,000 ballots are at issue in Arizona, 548,000 in Michigan, 204,000 in Georgia, and over 121,000 in Pennsylvania.

Few care that New York state will soon illegal aliens into private homes with spare rooms. Again, via Gateway Pundit:

“It is my vision to take the next step to this faith-based locales and then move to a private residence,” Adams said during a City Hall press conference.

I challenge you to scroll through any right-of-center news site today and determine that O’Brien’s world is not emerging in real time. Just the News, The National Pulse, The Gateway Pundit, LifeSiteNews—take your pick.

Revolutions of the past were led by the people with much to lose, as Jeffrey Tucker points out on The Daily Reckoning today. He points out that, sometime in this 21st century of Our Lord, the aristocracy, which traditionally put limits on government power, now owns the government:

But it was at this point that a titanic shift began to take place, especially after 9/11. The interests of the “great families” and the state began to align across the board (and not just on matters of war and peace). These family fortunes were no longer attached to Old World ideals but to technologies of control.

The paradigmatic case is the Gates Foundation but the same holds true of Rockefeller, Koch, Johnson, Ford and Bezos. As the main funders of the World Health Organization and “scientific” research grants, they are the main forces behind the newest and largest threats to the freedom of the individual.

These foundations built from capitalist wealth, and now fully controlled by bureaucrats loyal to statist causes, are on the wrong side of the crucial debates of our time. They fight not for the emancipation of the people but rather more control.

And, if you think the NSA’s spying is scary, realize that the NSA only applies the algorithms. The probes are in your hand and on your desk and answering your front door. Amazon bought Ring for a reason: it can spy on you, but it can also spy on Amazon’s employees who drop the packages at your door.

O’Brien also gives us the answer to this question posed in a headline on Zerohedge today:

Why? Because taking children from their mother, destroying the orgasm, eliminating loyalty to anything but the state is all that matters. Companies like Target and Anheuser Busch have seen the future, and it is 1984.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.

—1984

They can give in to their customers now, or they can share in control of the human race. They’d rather have control. They will exact their revenge for the boycotts by kicking us in the face—forever.

The Revolution Will Be Controlled By Them

Yes, there will be a revolution. But, unlike the revolutions of the past, the next American Revolution will be scripted and managed by the regime. What the people think they’re doing will not be what they’re actually doing.

People on the right have warned that the government wants us to rebel so they can put down the rebellion. That’s probably true, but the rebellion won’t start until the government wants it to start. We’re already past the point of a spontaneous, popular revolt. For God’s sake, they stole the 2020 election and no one is doing anything about it!

But there is a way out.

Our Help Is In the Name of the Lord

R. Who made heaven and earth

All we have left is God, and that’s all God wants us to have. The scriptures are full of this message: God alone, Christ alone, the Holy Trinity alone. See 1 John 2:15:

Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

The Beatles told us, “all you need is love,” and Jesus told us God is love. Therefore, all you need is God.

First-century Christians didn’t revolt, nor did they capitulate. They practiced Christianity until Constantine gave up and made Christianity the official religion of Rome. It took three centuries and cost countless Christian lives (we call them “saints” and “martyrs”), but Rome fell to God before it fell to its own devices. Some scholars even claim Rome did not fall, but was subsumed into the Church, and there’s good reason to believe that.

For us, we cannot see the centuries ahead, but we can make a pretty good guess about the next couple of years. If viewed from the perspective of America’s last 200 years, things are going to get a lot worse. But, if we view them through the eyes of second-century Christian, God has blessed with the greatest opportunity for sainthood in the last 2,000 years. All we need is love for God and hatred for this world. All we do is love one another for God’s sake, even though none of us deserves it.

The world and all things in it will be gone someday. If that’s a scary thought to you, as it is to me, then we’re still attached to this world in some way. In fact, we’re more attached to this world than to God, otherwise the return of Jesus and the tribulation preceding His return would seem be as eagerly anticipated as Christmas to a child.

The perfect revolution, then, would not involve arms and rebellions, but alms and fasting. Indifference to the things of this world would punish its captains more than any other act of defiance. This world hates God above all, and humanity because humanity is made in His image and likeness. They can’t kill God, so they stamp on our faces.

So, if you really want to punish the enemy, pray for him. If you want to take control away from the enemy, the ultimate weapon is the Rosary, and the invincible army is the white-robed martyrs.

And, remember, every enemy soldier is a child of God who has allowed himself to be fooled by demons. He needs our prayers, too, even if he doesn’t know it.

God, have mercy on us all.

1. Gladstone, J.A., What Causes Revolutions, Oxford University Press (2013).