To The Liberal Elites: Your Attacks On Trump Don't Make You Heroes

As the Nazis were coming to power in post-economic collapse Weimar, they were met with uniform denunciations from liberal elites. The German novelist Thomas Mann wrote two months into Hitler’s term that the “common scum” had risen to power “accompanied by vast rejoicing on the part of the masses.” These denunciations, as Mann’s sentiment demonstrates, were mere statements of embarrassment that such crude and buffoonish demagogues had entered the palace, with the institutional decay and growing destitution that creates fascism not being addressed. The Nazis used this to demonize the “lying press,” present themselves as saviors, and rapidly cut into those ruined institutions. Within half a year of Hitler’s appointment to head of state, the media had become Chancellor-controlled, all the competing political parties had been eliminated, and the Nazi police forces had been given absolute authority as precedent for their eventual mission.

Our transition into that state isn’t as quick, but the equation of an imploding empire never deviates. Eight months into the Trump presidency, the political and media establishments continue to give their indignant pronouncements. The pundits, celebrities, politicians, and entertainers who constantly denounce Trump do not deserve the praise the media gives them as long as those denunciations aren’t part of a larger goal to overthrow the corporate state. And we shouldn’t be surprised that they almost always aren’t. The power structure only elevates liberal public figures who will attack Trump and his endless scandals without focusing on the larger political crises we’re facing, and if any of those public figures don’t conform they’ll be promptly replaced with others who do. A theater is being put on to hide the rot beneath our dying republic’s shiny gold plating, and elites will try to prolong it as long as possible.

To save our civilization, we’ll need to have a mindset that doesn’t tie singular goals to solving this crisis. We have to not act like removing Trump, or voting Democrats in in 2018, or trying to change the political system from within, can stop the death knell that scientists say will come for the climate in 2020 if drastic change doesn't happen before then. The solution is to destroy the Deep State’s propaganda machine with sustained efforts to get the truth out, to build institutions and movements that fight power from the outside, to stop trying to navigate within a system that one can only be crushed by or be assimilated into. 

The political establishment’s attacks on Trump are part of an effort to make us not adopt that mindset, to lead us into serving the old systems by promising savior from one villain at the center of an overall toxic and failing state. This makes the liberal elite not heroic truth tellers, but selective deniers of the very sources of fascism: of the decline in democracy and the integrity of the law, which reached their logical conclusion this week when a judge declared the DNC has a right to rig elections; of the rise in economic kleptocracy, which has left half the country officially poor while the majority are regressing to a third world lifestyle; of the hatred for institutions that’s resulted from the population’s misery, which in modern America is exploited through reactionary “true news” clickbait sites and a narcissistic demagogue who replaces reality with whatever comes into his mind at the moment.

Just like the fascists of past collapsing empires, the Trump administration is using these moral and organizational weaknesses in the political establishment to seize more power. And their chances for a coup grow every day. As ICE officials already engage in newly repressive tactics and some Muslims are already barred from the borders because of their faith, the Trump regime shows explicitly that they’ll exploit the looming financial and geopolitical crises to enact their utopianist vision. This is a future where corporations rule free from the “administrative state” which protects the environment, provides social services for the poor, and gives alternative media sites the same online presence as those of the corporate media; where women, gays, undocumented immigrants, people of color, and Muslims are given a far lower status; where a militarized police, an omnipotent surveillance state, a global military empire, and corporate propaganda outlets are left unchallenged.

Like I said the solutions do exist, but history’s movements into darkness can look too intimidating to overcome. Poverty clouds one’s ability to be hopeful while stealing massive amounts of one’s time with trying to survive. The corporate state can easily cripple people’s ability to mobilize by arresting them and putting them into a lifelong situation of no voting rights, limited employment opportunities, and constant police monitoring. The operations of the military industrial complex can seem like global-scale developments beyond any ordinary person’s control. I’m asking you to keep exposing the Deep State’s propaganda, organizing in your community, and voicing dissent in spite of all that. To be crushed by the system while trying to defeat it, and then keep fighting it anyway.

This is what it means to be a rebel. It doesn’t mean trusting in the liberal elites just because they happen to dislike Trump. Their slick, shiny sound bite sequences and TV studios are part of a great illusion, to stop playing when our old systems break down. Already it’s flickering on and off. Let’s build a better world in its ruins.

To The War Profiteers: You Know You Can't Keep This Up Much Longer

Activists and leaders aren’t the ones who start revolutions. The core inspirers of change are those who never get to make speeches or hold dramatic protests or become beloved historical figures, because they’re the ones who are destroyed by the old systems.

The unrecognized heroes in this case are the four million or so innocent Muslims who’ve died in American wars since 1990 alone, the more than 22 veterans who commit suicide every day, the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have died in the imperialist wars since World War Two. And then there are the nearly forty thousand U.S. veterans who are currently homeless, the ten thousand people or so who have killed themselves in the last ten years in part from the financial crisis, the tens of thousands who die each year in this country for lack of health care, and the rest of the countless billions who’ve suffered or died because of the genocide-fueled global hierarchy that’s existed for so many decades.

These people are treated as the human utilities the corporate state views them as. Their stories are reduced to statistics, which are then hidden or trivialized in front of a populous that’s constantly exposed to noxious propaganda about worshipping the military, advancing corporate profits, and fearing an interchangeable series of enemies. War is the central instrument in this, providing a means for maintaining the oil economy, persuading the population toward allegiance to the state, and destroying resources that could be used for educating and empowering that population. And the current developments in Syria, Russia, and North Korea are exactly what we’ve seen dozens of times for as long as anyone can remember: shocking offenses are revealed on the part of a foreign government, uproar dominates in the press for months, and then military action is taken. The difference now is that those last two designated foreign threats are nuclear powers.

Yet even as the unacknowledged hubris of the war machine’s victims seem to poetically manifest in a war that will make us all into victims, one can sense something else may be meant to come from this tragedy. Hints of it can be seen in the emerging resentment for U.S. military empire among the anti-establishment right, in the scattered stories of Bush voters who now want an end to the wars after seeing innocents die and families suffer because of those wars; in the rapidly swelling effort in these last few years to dismantle the war machine and the oligarchical systems it supports: a new world is appearing, one where the warmongers can no longer control the populace and the old order falls apart.

The warmongers show their anxiety over this in their surrounding Russia and China with nuclear bases; in their creation of an aggressive neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine to threaten the Russian Federation; in their establishment of a Ministry of Truth and legalized CIA psy ops; in their aggressive pushing of a Russian hacking narrative that’s been debunked this month with a very easy private investigation of the DNC leak’s nature; in their Bana Alabad psy op, which presented Syrian war propaganda under the bizarre guise of a seven-year-old girl who wanted her homeland bombed; in their elaborate, escalating effort to deflect from their own moral failures and expand their empire to proportions even they must know are absurd.

Do you think all this could mean the elite aren’t feeling ambitious, but scared for their future? Studies of where world events are going imagine the United States will lose all of its military influence by the end of next decade. We’ve been seeing tremors of this collapse for years as regime change efforts have devolved into uncontrollable chaos, and it’s only gotten worse as the Trump administration has expanded the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen. This while the global amount of Internet users is now 3.7 billion and growing every second, letting dissenters of the war machine spread their messages in volumes often rivaling the viewership of the detested corporate media outlets.

We know you’re worried, war profiteers, and that’s made clearer with every propaganda bulletin you show us. Your recent Politico piece lengthily denouncing the efforts of those dissenting online journalists as “Russian propaganda” was especially revealing in its frantic tone. And eliminating the alternative press with corporate censorship and an end to net neutrality, as the oligarchs are starting to do, will only prove oppressive regimes need to crush dissenting voices for their ideas to keep being listened to. Which is to say oppressive regimes can’t last forever.

There have been people who’ve fought all their lives for an end to war-for-profit only to die while the empire is still going, and now their efforts may be about to prevail. But even they, let’s remember, are not the ones who’ve sacrificed the most for this revolution. That’s the ones who’ve been directly annihilated by the empire. Though those ones can’t read this, I’ll say to them: you haven’t gone without doing so much good afterward. We who’ve survived are close to changing the world in your honor, and even if we don’t change it so soon, you won’t be forgotten.

It Has To Be Said: The "Centrists" Are Now Dangerous Extremists

The longer a dictatorship is in place, the more brutal it tends to get. The United States has had an oligarchy for decades if not centuries, and that fact shows itself these days spectacularly. Around a hundredth of the American population hasn’t always been incarcerated through a racist and inhumane criminal justice system. All of our electronic communications have not always been monitored so that a corporate-controlled intelligence community can censor and prosecute dissidents. Most Americans haven’t always been regressing to a third world lifestyle while eight men hold as much wealth as the bottom half of the world population. The U.S. hasn’t always had more than eight hundred military bases around the world while most taxpayer money goes to funding several perpetual wars at a time.

And our culture hasn’t always been engineered toward making these things seem acceptable. The transition into the current state has been carefully lined with deception and concealment, with facts and history beings systemically obscured whenever an oligarchical takeover is made. The effects of this on ordinary people are of course always appalling, but there’s a spectrum of how far the corporate state’s propaganda reaches into someone’s mind. 

Some support the assault on the poor, the militarization of society, and the other oligarchical practices with open zeal and a malice toward those being hurt by those practices. But zeal comes from consciousness, which endangers the dependent thought that elites want to cultivate among the population. What the oligarchs seem most comfortable with is a citizenry that passively and unthinkingly accepts what they’re told, which can be found in the current political “center.”

The system’s horrors aren’t celebrated by this type of propaganda. They’re almost always made to look trivial or hidden from the discussion entirely. Corporatist trade deals are enacted, causing millions of people in the now post-industrial areas to lose their livelihoods and then in many cases turn to drugs or suicide; pro-establishment Democrats are told that this is the inevitable result of globalization. An unprecedented seven wars are overseen by the Obama administration, slaughtering large populations, driving many of the survivors to poverty and emaciation, and causing babies near the depleted uranium attacks to be born with cracked white skin and bulging red eyes; Obama loyalists deny this happened because their leaders never tell them about it. Atrocity and injustice are given an air of emotional detachment, and those who point it out are called naive or mistaken.

This pathology is unsurpassed in the physical danger it poses, because it’s how the unelected bureaucrats that are now driving us toward an apocalyptic war with Russia rationalize their actions. There’s no way of tearing those elites away from their cold, hyper-imperialist mindsets. They’re far too deep into a system so corrupted that it seems able to rule all on its own. We can only stop this system from turning the planet into a smoldering atomic heap by letting it destroy itself. By exposing the system’s failures to those caught up in “centrism” and the other dangerous worldviews; by building economies, agricultural arrangements and media outlets apart from those of the corporate state; by simply sitting back as the federal government, Wall Street, and the U.S. military empire expectedly become too dysfunctional to maintain their power in the coming years.

And most of all by tearing down the reputation the political establishment and the “center” has tried to give itself of something authoritative or respectable. This system is based on, to put it so honestly, lies-lies about the results of elections and the beliefs of the populous, lies about what the designated geopolitical enemies do and how to treat them, lies about corporate capitalism and what it does, lies even about how humans should relate to each other and the world. The truth, meanwhile, can’t ever be identified as certainly as lies can, but it’s all that can save us from extinction, and it’s what the future will be based on. 

The People Are Taking Control Now. Get Used To It.

The CIA-funded Washington Post put out an article this week titled “The Bernie Bros and sisters are coming to Republicans’ rescue.”

First, let’s thank the Post for acknowledging Bernie Sanders’ polling higher among women than men by including “sisters.” It shows that whether or not a group is actually male-dominated or has anything else wrong with it, the types behind such headlines are going to attack that group if it challenges the neoliberal power structure. Their goals are not to advance social equality, or to win elections for the designated good guys as that article professes, or to defend any kind of pragmatism. It’s to maintain the imperialist, corporate capitalist hierarchy that they profit from, whatever the alterations of reality that need to happen in the process.

The problem is, for most people these alterations can’t be accepted. The majority of the country does not believe that Russia is what’s caused the Trump presidency (which, good news, was officially disproven last week), or that unparalleled destruction and imperialism are how to keep us safe, or that it’s right to keep half of Americans in poverty while giving the top 0.1% as much wealth as the bottom 90%. The people not believing what they’re told is not what the ruling powers can’t handle, though-that fact doesn’t mean much when the elites holdoverwhelming control. What those elites can’t handle is that the people are now actually taking away their power.

What the oligarchs really don’t like, as the headline mentioned above proves, is when the people apply their dissenting attitudes into meaningful action. When they successfully run a candidate of their own whose sabotaged campaign is used as inspiration for thousands of future campaigns like it. When they build a little-noticed but growing series of local communities whose energy and business systems aren’t dependent on large corporations. When they take the latest lies from the U.S. war machine and use the alternative media, which has surpassed popularity of the corporate media, to mostly undermine faith in them.

Of course, my telling the rulers to get used to it is rhetorical. That’s not what rulers do, and their counters to the uprising has been staggering: mass arrests and police harassment against the Occupy and Democracy Spring Protestors; psy ops like “fake news” that spread suspicion about dissenting voices; the demonization of Muslims, immigrants, and African Americans to deflect from the corporate state’s failures; blatant election rigging; and the increases in surveillance, censorship, and police militarization. 

Yet those are all standard tactics of authoritarian regimes. The special thing about this oligarchy’s attempts to keep itself going is how easily it can use war and catastrophe to its advantage; after decades of manufacturing relatively minor conflicts, the U.S. empire is now trying to take power through starting a Third World War. This is clear from the nuclear missiles that have been encircled around China and Russia; from the aggressive neo-Nazi regime the U.S. installed in Ukraine in 2014 so that it could destabilize the Russian Federation; from the neocons’ doing everything they can to escalate tensions in Syria while Russia has already threatened military retribution; from NATO’s making many former allies of Russia turn against Russia; from the many hoaxes that are clearly involved in the corporate state’s instigation of hostility toward North Korea; from the uniform statements from corporate media pundits, political leaders, and NATO allies that Russia’s fictional hacking of the DNC was an “act of war;” from a U.S. military head’s recent promise that he would nuke China if given the order. 

A geopolitical shock like has never happened before is being prepared, and when it comes we’ll have to make just as big an effort to stop it from working as intended. We’ll need to organize for revolt underground as civil liberties are eliminated. We’ll need to counter the corporate state’s propaganda by spreading alternative news in secret. We’ll need to keep the population from being intimidated into submission by a government that won’t tolerate any dissent.

And you know what? We’re going to do all of this, and then build the peaceful, ecologically balanced social democracy that humanity needs to survive. We’re going to do this because the will to fight for a better world has already been put in us irreversibly, and because our civilization and planet have become too damaged by the old systems for us to go back to trusting them. That’s what the power centers can’t understand or accept. But whether or not they can, they’re coming down.

To The Clintonite Russia Warmongers: We're Not Going To Let You Do This

The mushroom cloud is already here. It’s just moving too slowly to see at first. The traces of it can be seen everywhere-in the peeling paint and overgrow of houses that can’t be refurbished with this economy, in the unnaturally hot weather we’ve all in some way experienced, in things as mundane as our culture’s typical political vocabulary amid a state of decline. The cloud has been created by a litany of mistakes humanity has made-the rise of corporate power, the weakening of our liberal institutions, the modern disconnect from nature-that happened in increments too small for enough people to have cared to stop them.

The cloud has grown through the self-perpetuating strings of disasters that these missteps have made (the corporatisation of the economy drove up poverty, poverty drove up rightist demagoguery, rightist demagoguery resulted in an even more corporatized government, and so on), till now, after centuries of this collapse cycle, the cloud is close to manifesting visually in a war between the two major nuclear superpowers.

There’s no reasoning with those behind this war effort, because they see this situation from a completely different vantage point than ordinary people do. They’ve been taught not to perceive the dangers of a confrontation with Russia by their extreme conditioning into neoconservatism-what Dr. Paul Craig Roberts calls “the most dangerous ideology that has ever existed”-which glorifies war and U.S. imperialism without limit. They’ve been made physically comfortable with the idea of an apocalypse by their immersion in the modern super-rich lifestyle and by the luxury survival bunkers they’ve built in recent years. Economic terrorism and environmental holocaust are rationalized in the same way, turned into what look like trivialities from within the safety of the palace.

Hillary Clinton, who so well exemplified this elite disconnect from danger by promising last year that her precarious no-fly zone plan couldn’t lead to war with Russia, represented an agenda that the Deep State has been planning on getting through whether or not she’d win. This agenda is being advanced through frequent and theatrical revelations from suspicious government sources about Russia, a tactic which was illustrated dramatically last month when the beltway Russiagate uproar softened after Trump signed Russia sanctions. And it includes nothing less than the creation of a society devoid of empathy or independent thought, where fear over manufactured enemies and a hostility toward nonconformists are universal and enforced by every aspect of life. 

Something like that already exists as so much of the populus hates the poor, sides against whistleblowers, and detests science and higher education. And it’s clear those responsible for this will do anything to turn it into their ideal vision.

I don’t know exactly what the Deep State is trying to do by escalating tensions with Russia, or what exactly is going on with this wild internal drama the government is in, or what the outcome of it all might be. What I know is that all life on earth, or at least anything like democracy, is under threat from the insane agenda being enabled by the Clintonites. And that I should make my intentions and the intentions of most Americans clear: we are not going to let the planet be destroyed in a heart-wrenchingly appropriate atomic cloud because a small minority of the population still sides with the old systems.

Yes, Peter Dou, Joy Reid, and the other palace insiders who, even in this moment of peril, are now tweeting racism and sexism charges against Sanders supporters amid the first hints of scrutiny for your 2020 Wall Street candidate. I’m stating what the Washington culture, in its arrogance, has decided to ignore, which is that most people don’t support the imperialist, neoliberal order. This was proven last year when it took the literal flipping of millions of votes to nominate the establishment candidate, who then lost an election all indicators said the people’s candidate would crush. It was also proven when the corporate news outlets became less sought out than the independent media, when the grassroots political scene became dominated by revolutionary-minded people, and when the formerly untouchable oligarchy couldn’t get its TPP passed because of the people’s will.

If those insiders don’t like my use back there of the term “neoliberal” as they’ve made clear in other contexts, or don’t like my pejorative use of the term “neocon,” I’m proud to include them. Because words like these express the obscene injustices of the machine that the Clintonites are trying to keep in place-and that we, the majority of the population, are going to dismantle before it can take the human race down with it.

We don’t support your way of running things, Clintonites, because we’ve essentially had them in place for 5,000 years and they’ve gotten us here. It’s August 2017, a few more small malfunctions on humanity’s part are probably all that separate us from obliteration, and we’re not letting it happen that way. We’re going to keep making noise about the Deep State’s tactics from our enormous platforms in the alternative media. We’re going to keep seeking out strategies to block what the neocons want to do, whether those strategies involve politics or some deeper means if change. We’re going to end this insanity, build a better world in its place, and do so knowing that till the nuclear missiles are actually fired, the mushroom cloud is reversible.

Clintonites Are Attacking The Bernie Movement Because They Know Their Brand Is Going Extinct

Why do I keep focusing so much on the Clintonites? It’s not because I’m living in 2016 or don’t have my priorities straight. It’s because this subject provides an interesting and encouraging way to look at where we’re headed as a society.

That’s not how it would at first seem from seeing this noxious part of the neoliberal oligarchy’s effort to prop itself up. Donald Trump and his cult are pathological and threatening to democracy, but the deeper power structure, the one the Clintonites represent, is far more scary; the inner forces within the American government are doing everything they can to escalate tensions with Russia, in what seems to be an insane gamble between nuclear annihilation and the massive benefits elites would get from a new Cold War. And the Clintonites are making all this possible, accepting every absurd claim the warmongers put out while intensely attacking the Bernie movement-which, though it’s hard to believe, is only here to create a just and peaceful social democracy.

While that business with the Deep State’s war ambitions can give one terrified paralysis when seriously considered (see John Pilger’s piece about this from yesterday called How The World May End), comfort comes in seeing just how close the pathologies behind it are to disappearing. 

Maybe it’s because of how nearly 3.7 billion people have internet access with around ten joining in every second. Or because nearly everyone has experienced some kind of economic decline in the last few decades with half the country being officially poor. Or because the government, the media, and conventional academia have lied to the people on every major bad decision we’ve recently made, from the Iraq War to “free trade.” But like with ecological awareness or racial equality or gay marriage, a general awareness has come that the old systems and authorities the Clintonites so aggressively support are not to be trusted.

This shift has come with a lot of new paranoid and unconstructive attitudes, but that’s an inevitable part of having societies grow out of their repressive old molds. A plurality of Americans now support the crucial work of WikiLeaks; almost two thirds don’t feel represented by either major party; over two thirds distrust the major media and the U.S. government; a clear majority like Bernie Sanders and his “radical” reforms (and they actually voted him in last year). And then there are the holdouts, the one tenth that wants Obamacare as is, the one third that feels represented by the Democratic  establishment, one-twentieth that feels their Democratic Party is threatened by Sanders (around 30% are Democrats and around 80% of Democrats like Bernie).

That’s all the Joy Reids and John Podestas and James Clappers have been able to sway towards joining their apocalyptic mission. This is why the majority of the population has not given permission to escalate the war in Syria, and why it will only take a Pearl Harbor event to get them to support what the neocons are advocating. And the neocons’ feeling the need to apparently prepare for that event, as well as to attack the Bernie movement, reveals an insecurity about whether society will allow their plans to go through.

To get past all that rambling optimism, the war-loving, corporate capitalist, blindly tribalist old systems are dangling on the precipice, about to be driven out by the compassionate paradigm that history has been moving humanity towards for millennia. The ruling powers and their surrogates are reacting to this by going into a frenzy, rallying the cult that’s emerged around the Clintons and the DNC towards atomic holy war by scapegoating and maligning the progressives who are trying to put some kind of reason into the debate. But ultimately this cult will prove to be something unique to one small part of history, really just an overzealous spillover of the intense Democrat partisan sentiments which happened in 2016-and that won’t feel relevant enough five, ten, or fifty years from now for its current followers (or the younger generations around them) to invest in. In the year 2050, will anyone still be saying things like “we need to stop the Bernie Bros because they stole the presidency from Hillary?”

But what the Berners and the anti-establishment people in general have signed onto will be relevant forever. Because it represents the unrepressible human urge to defy bullies and tyrants, to act compassionate, to move things in a better direction. Keep stirring up dissent. Keep doing whatever you can to stand with the destitute and marginalized. Keep up the revolution.

Why The Neoliberals Will Fail

A people lose their ability to survive as soon as they lose their capacity for empathy. And our society forgot that a long time ago. The modern oligarchs have gone further than simply dividing the oppressed by race and gender; under neoliberalism, authority tells us to accept our lack of economic and civil freedoms outright, using the toxic Randian philosophy of one’s wealth always reflecting their personal judgment and the poor and oppressed therefore being objects of contempt.

This is how the corporate state’s adherents are made to condescend to and mock the suffering of the poor; to side with the elite-controlled police forces as they see anti-war, environmental, or economic justice protesters get beaten, maced or attacked by dogs; to revel in the destruction of nature for corporate profits and the massacre of people in U.S.-invaded regions.

Something like this last happened with the rise of corporate fascism in Italy during the early 19th century authoritarian drift. And the human costs of the new fascist turn are the same as the last one-they just aren’t so well noticed. At least 10,000 suicides have been tied to the financial crisis; tens of thousands of Americans die each year for lack of health care; middle eastern wars have killed over four million Muslims since 1990 alone, and hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from the imperial wars since World War II; then there are the 100 people who die from opioids every day largely as a result of them turning to drugs amid poverty, the thousands of Americans who die each year from unemployment, and the rest of the not easily accounted for population that’s suffered or died because of the way our economic system is designed.

Yes, what’s different about this holocaust is that its casualties happen in undeliberate settings throughout the global south and the impoverished community, with people made complicit in it through an effort to hide or trivialize these genocidal realities. In place of healthy grief over the tragedies neoliberalism causes, there’s an attitude of callousness-not exactly a gladness for what’s happening, but a rationalization of it enforced by “capitalist” orthodoxy, misleading political language, and a vague disdain for the victimized groups.

So society’s moral failures go unacknowledged, making these failures come back to us in the form of collapse-government shutdown, economic unraveling, resource depletion, world war, climate catastrophe, and anarchistic violence have all begun, and their being sure to accelerate in the coming years shows just how civilizations built on lack of empathy self-destruct.

Then comes the possibility we tend not to consider during our relays of the “collapse will lead to the oligarchy’s demise” prediction: that the power structure will find a way to survive the fall. That the elites, who are already well-equipped for breakdown with the many luxury bunkers they’ve been building in recent years, will leverage the following calamity into the ultimate seizure of power. It’s how many dystopian stories describe the rise of their dictatorships, such as how multiple atomic explosions allowed for the takeover of the regime in 1984, and it’s what could happen in the next few years. The corporate state has the military forces, propaganda skills and wealth to do this, and the Trump administration’s “shock doctrine” tactics hint it’s being prepared for.

The neoliberals are doing everything right towards making their revolution permanent. Yet as we all know, they’re going to fail.

They’re going to fail because human beings do and will always have an almost logic-defying ability to find empathy. This is what history has shown, no matter the mental conditioning that’s been put up against people’s attempts toward doing what’s moral and humane. There have been the slave owners, taught all their lives to think certain people are inferior and deserving of captivity, who’ve changed their worldview when seeing evidence against that; there have been the many Nazis, taught through a rigorous groupthink that certain populations were threats that needed to be exterminated, who’ve turned that belief around when seeing these were in fact other human beings; there have been the American soldiers in Vietnam, who’ve suddenly decided to disobey their authorities in the U.S. military when ordered to kill small children. And on the examples go.

Whatever the efforts to kill the empathy instinct, it’s always shown itself to be able to come back in people, with profound inner change taking place in as shortly as seconds. It doesn’t ultimately matter that that the transformations mentioned happened amid a vast majority of other people consenting to their programming, for the same reason it didn’t ultimately matter that the anti-slavery, women’s rights, and civil rights movements begun amid a vast majority of people accepting the status quo. This shows no propaganda system, even one as ingenius as neoliberalism, can hold faith forever.

Which shows whether or not the present self-described “political revolution” of an effort at overthrow succeeds, whether or not the uprisings are suppressed by the corporate state’s apparent plans for dismantling a free press, and outlawing organized protest, and winning consent through extreme shocks to the system, overthrow will happen. The consequence, though, is that a lot of people who aren’t already awake to the system’s injustices will have to go through a painful realization period before joining the effort-a transition that will be more difficult the longer the system lasts. But that transition will be worthwhile, because its final form will be what our society needs even more than a political revolution: a healing for the damage that’s been done.