AMERICA FIRST (AMENDMENT)
America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve got to want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say, ‘You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.
– President Andrew Shepard, The American President (1995)
Can you believe it? Patriotic American dialogue like this (apropos given that today is Independence Day) was commonplace at your local multiplex (spoken here by a fictional Democrat President, no less) just a quarter of a century ago. Rhetoric of this nature is evergreen, helping to underscore the importance of the First Amendment, the great equalizer, the bedrock of American democracy. The Framers put this bad boy at the top of the Bill of Rights for a reason.
In essence, free speech matters. A lot. To you, dear reader, this may seem like the antithesis of a controversial admission. Defending someone’s right to speak to the death, even if you disapprove of what that someone might say, is a sentiment as American as apple pie, right? Regrettably, a plethora of data tells us that large swaths of the populace would shake their heads in disagreement. While a 2015 Pew survey discovered that 40% of millennials believe that the government should have the power to ban statements offensive to minority groups, another survey, conducted by the Cato Institute in 2017, found that 52% of self-identified Democrats, of all ages, viewed government suppression of “offensive speech” (a category of speech as arbitrary and intentionally ambiguous as “hate speech,” a supposed corollary to the also non-existent “love speech”) as more important than the unfettered right to say whatever one wants.
We can only begin to imagine what a survey conducted in 2021 would illuminate for us.
As a soldier who took a sworn oath to uphold the constitution, to support and defend it, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) recently expressed her concerns over the chattering class’ warm embrace of censorship via its continued support of Big Tech free speech crackdowns:
It is really disheartening to see how people are so inward-looking [and] only supporting of voices of those who agree with them, rather than recognizing the country that our founders envisioned for all of us… the freedom of speech of every single person in this country, whether we agree with that speech or not. Whether that speech offends us or not. That is what is at the heart of this country and who we are as Americans. And we must all stand up and support that and make sure that we pressure our leaders to do the same.
As Gabbard correctly asserts, freedom of speech is the beating ‘heart of this country’ and defending it should be ‘who we are as Americans.’ Though freedom of speech is a value of Western Civilization, only in America is it actually enshrined in the First Amendment. Its existence reminds the rest of the world that we are not just a free country, but also the freest. Furthermore, it is the foundational right of any truly open society, as every other single right derives from it. Without its protections, any individual with heterodox views loses the only real power they have against the mob. Without freedom of thought and the ability to say what we think, we cease to be a free people. If you think that’s an exaggeration, just ask Salman Rushdie, who received a fatwa calling for his assassination by the late Iran Ayatollah Khomeini after publishing his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, in 1988.
Asking “Do We Have Fight the Battle for the Enlightenment All Over Again?” in 2005, Rushdie wrote:
The idea that any kind of free society can be constructed in which people will never be offended or insulted, or in which they have the right to call on the law to defend them against being offended or insulted, is absurd…The moment you say that an idea system is sacred, whether it’s a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.
Hearing speech that might leave you ‘offended’ every once in a while is the price of citizenship in a free society. There is no “I believe in free speech, but…” That’s not how this thing of ours works and it misses the entire point. There are no workarounds. America was literally designed to be a safe space for free speech.
Unfortunately, however, our current modern establishment loathes the First Amendment. Every generation of elites has ideas, and those ideas enter the bloodstream of a society. Whether our current crop of elites are too embarrassed by their demonstrably horrible and divisive ones (see “critical race theory”) to take any actual responsibility for them, or are actually just too dumb to understand why censorship cannot and will not ever reinvent itself as an exercise in good faith, what has become painstakingly obvious is that they would rather not let those with views that run counter to theirs compete in the marketplace of ideas.
At this point, you might reasonably ask yourself why our ruling class doesn’t take pride in the First Amendment. After all, aren’t they American citizens, too?
Therein lies the rub.
CITIZENS OF THE WORLD
The truth is that our corporatist elites don’t actually view themselves as American citizens of a nation-state. Rather, they see themselves as “Global Citizens,” allies of an unelected and unaccountable permanent bureaucratic American Globalist Empire (h/t Darren Beattie) that prizes transnational social, political, and economic ties over any sort of distinct American identity. As such, it makes sense as to why they wouldn’t cherish the First Amendment. If you don’t believe America is deserving of her own unique identity, why would you? As filmmaker and political commentator Mike Cernovich explains:
Globalists [don’t care] about the United States and [are] unwilling to give any priority to American workers over their foreign competitors. To a globalist, Americans are no different than Nigerians, Mexicans, or Turks. Globalists believe if someone in a foreign land is able to do a job cheaper than an American worker can, then those jobs should be offshored. According to globalists, Americans do not deserve to exist as a unique national identity, although it’s another story for everyone else.
In an attempt to rebuild a new society that better reflects their globalist worldview, these Authoritarian ideologues will do anything and everything they can to quash dissent from their deranged orthodoxy while pearl clutching, providing cover for the Chinese Communist Party, and feigning concern over “misinformation”.
Denouncing the “junior high hall-monitor tattling” tactics of “woke” U.S. corporate media journalists, those enforcers of conformity, those ruling class footsoldiers conducting “Stasi-like citizen surveillance” as a means of chilling speech and getting those not in lockstep with the American Globalist Empire fired, Glenn Greenwald, a First Amendment lawyer who entered independent journalism after becoming increasingly concerned with George W. Bush’s attacks on civil liberties in the aftermath of 9/11, describes our current “unimaginably warped dynamic”:
U.S. journalists are not the defenders of free speech values but the primary crusaders to destroy them. They do it in part for power: to ensure nobody but they can control the flow of information. They do it partly for ideology and out of hubris: the belief that their worldview is so indisputably right that all dissent is inherently dangerous “disinformation.” And they do it from petty vindictiveness: they clearly get aroused — find otherwise-elusive purpose — by destroying people’s reputations and lives, no matter how powerless.
The late American historian and social critic Christopher Lasch, a firm believer that our ruling class had a lot to learn from the misunderstood populist movements of the 19th and 20th century, saw this moment coming. In his most pivotal work, The Revolt of the Elites (and the Betrayal of Democracy, Lasch expands upon The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations in order to critique the values and beliefs of America’s professional and managerial class. Supporting elements of cultural conservatism while critiquing the excesses of global capitalism, Lasch makes the argument that democracy today is threatened not by the masses, but, rather, by the elites calling the shots of the American Globalist Empire. “These elites, mobile and increasingly global in outlook, refuse to accept limits or ties to nation and place. As they isolate themselves in their networks and enclaves, they abandon the middle class, divide the nation, and betray the idea of a democracy for all America’s citizens.”
Suffice to say, the times are a’ changing. Freedom of speech, once considered the pinnacle of nonpartisan American values, now appears to be up for grabs.
A NEW WORLD ORDER
You can draw a direct line from the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, the Godfather of Corporate Liberalism, to George H.W. Bush. Like Wilson, H.W. had a new vision for how government and global commerce could assimilate in order to increase “efficiency”. Having run under the slogan “A kinder, gentler nation,” the former CIA spook spoke of bringing Wilson’s corporatist wet dream of globalization to fruition in his 1990 Address to the United Nations General Assembly. Going full John Lennon “Imagine,” H.W. professed to see “a world of open borders, open trade and, most importantly, open minds; a world that celebrates the common heritage that belongs to all the world’s people, taking pride not just in hometown or homeland but in humanity itself.” The way H.W. saw it, U.S. citizens might unwittingly pay billions to subsidize large corporations so that said corporations could turn around and crush them, but, hey, at least they could take pride in ‘humanity’.
Wait, huh? What kind of phony, soft, kumbaya crap was this?
In any case, H.W. proceeded to usher in the bipartisan “New World Order” globalist worldview that really began to coalesce after the Berlin Wall fell. This was the precise moment when both parties truly joined forces to abandon any kind of economic nationalism that might help the working and middle class achieve the American Dream in favor of consensus-as-virtue globalism, an obvious ponzi scheme designed by elites (and, not surprisingly, for elites) in which the ruling class redistributes wealth from the working-and-middle class in order to line their pockets under the guise of global “capitalism,” all while pushing ‘open trade,’ ‘open borders,’ and a weird, cockamamie global government that quite literally nobody asked for. Ah, yes. This was the flashpoint wherein the existential battle between elitist orthodoxy and freethinking, one that still rages on today, truly began.
Ann Coulter describes what transpired soon thereafter in her book In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!:
The PC regime wasn’t installed until after Reagan. Sometime since then we became a society that rewards people for being little Nazi block watchers. Apart from the fact that PC is annoying, it’s now bled into how America conceives of itself, influencing public policy. Political correctness instructs that the historic American nation is guilty of everything and the third world hordes overwhelming us are innocent little lambs.
‘The PC regime’ wasn’t installed until after the Cold War ended, because, well, the Cold War never really ended in the first place. It just came home. As the late media entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart wrote in Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save The World, “The existential battle never ceased. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the battle simply took a different form. Instead of missiles, the new weapon was language and education.”
Like the tyrants who came before them, the ‘annoying’ cultural terrorists and ‘little Nazi block watchers’ of this ‘PC regime’ want freethinking American citizens scared, silent, and dejected. In The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, Libertarian evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad writes:
Political correctness is like the string of the spider wasp. Recall that the afflicted spider is dragged to the wasp’s burrow in a zombie-like state and is subsequently eaten in vivo by the wasp’s offspring. Political correctness achieves the same macabre objective – it allows nefarious ideas to slowly consume us while we sit quietly in a zombie-like state, too afraid to speak out. [PC] echoes the words that Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 plot, gave to the doomed passengers of the plane he hijacked: ‘Nobody move. Everything will be OK. If you try to make any moves, you’ll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet…. Nobody move, please. We are going back to the airport. Don’t try to make any stupid moves.
Thanks, ‘Mohamed,’ but no thanks.
THE (NOT-SO) GREAT AWOKENING
Fast forward to 2014, the year of “The Great Awokening”. This was the year after Hillary Clinton echoed H.W. (who voted for her in 2016 lest you think George Carlin was exaggerating when he said “It’s a BIG CLUB and you ain’t in it!”) in a speech to Brazilian bankers in which she conveyed her dream of “a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.” This was the year that the aforementioned ‘little Nazi block watchers’ returned with a vengeance, this time via a sick form of identity politics that former Islamist-turned-activist Maajid Nawaz has called “a throwback from the British colonial ‘divide and rule’ approach”. “The goal of [this PC] culture,” wrote Andrew Sullivan for New York Magazine, “…is not the emancipation of the individual from the group, but the permanent definition of the individual by the group. We used to call this bigotry. Now we call it being woke.”
A backlash seemed inevitable. PC had become so unbearable that it inadvertently created the conditions (even Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker confessed “Political Correctness is Redpilling America”) that would soon prove ripe for a full-throttle populist revolt. The idea that someone like Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders could win the presidency no longer seemed implausible. At all.
The writing was on the wall. Though you wouldn’t know it if you got your news from the sniveling talking head imbeciles in the Corporate Media, the United States stopped being a predominantly middle-class country for the first time in its history as of 2015. In 1970, 62% of American adults ranked as middle class. In 1972, if you take inflation into account, the average American worker earned $738.86 a week. By 2015, 43% of American adults ranked as middle-class. In 2016, the average American worker earned $723.67 a week. In the span of four-and-a-half decades, the American middle class shrunk by 19%, while the American worker got a pay cut of 2%.
As Oscar Wilde said, “Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.” When two-thirds of Americans view the country as being on the wrong track, and three-quarters of Americans believe that the country is in decline, is it really any wonder that Americans became more, how shall we say, open-minded?
Before making an impromptu pivot and becoming a full-time #resistance goof (likely in order to make “amends” for making the following based comment), actor, vocal Democrat, and former MSNBC host Alec Baldwin (yes, that Alec Baldwin) discussed the potential for a Donald Trump presidency on The Howard Stern Show in July 2015, just a month after The Donald came down the escalator at Trump Tower to officially announce his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. In a sense endorsing Trump, Baldwin said:
If Trump was the nominee, let alone won the election, if Trump was the GOP nominee, it’s exactly what we deserve right now with the system we have. There’s a part of me that would love to see Trump win. I would love to see Trump be the Republican nominee, and run for the President, and say to ourselves, because I’m a huge campaign finance reform person, I’d say this is exactly [what we deserve]. Money has destroyed the American political system. All these guys are like NASCAR drivers with the stickers on them of who owns them. Oh, please. And that goes with Democrat or Republican. Hillary, all of them across the board, are owned by somebody [because you’ve] got to raise sick amounts of money.
‘That goes with Democrat or Republican’ is right. It took two parties to get us into this mess. H.W. promised ‘a kinder, gentler nation,’ but for who? Meanwhile, on the same day (before he ultimately rolled over for the DNC), Bernie Sanders told the truth about one of the GOP’s main owners to Vox’s Ezra Klein, calling open borders a “Right-Wing Koch brothers proposal” that would make everyone in America poorer by doing away with the concept of Nation-State. When a fellow Vox writer got butthurt and lectured Sanders that he was “wrong in treating Americans’ lives as more valuable and worthy of concern than the lives of foreigners,” Sanders should have known that he was doing something right.
Speaking to Stephen Colbert about the populist appeal of a Bull-in-a-China-Shop like Trump in October 2015, Bill “The Great Explainer” Clinton reminded viewers why and how he got his nickname in the first place:
He’s the most interesting character out there because he says something that overrides the ideological differences. You looked at the first debate? A lot of those guys were competing to see who could be the most politically correct on the answers. Trump says ‘Ok, I’ve supported Democrats, I’ve supported Republicans, yeah I used to be friends with Bill Clinton. Who cares? I run things and I build things and we need someone who will go in there and fix it. And if they don’t let me fix it, I’ll just get them out of the way.’… He’s a master brander and there is a macho appeal to saying ‘I’m just sick of nothing happening. I make things happen. Vote for me.’
Bubba’s elite pals really should’ve listened to him, particularly his point about Trump saying something ‘that overrides the ideological differences.’ If they had, or even just listened or cared a little, they would have picked up on the truism that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe that the system is corrupt and responsible for the dissatisfactory state of the nation. In other words, Slick Willy’s buddies would have gotten hip to the fact that Americans were really beginning to understand the full extent to which their interests had gone right out the window and straight down the pishadoo. However, as the campaigns of Sanders and Trump went on, one thing became certain. Not only was the ruling class absolutely not listening, they hated the fact that anyone besides them was even talking. Period.
SUMMER 2016: THE FIX IS IN (FOR THE MEDIA)
With Sanders out of the way after Hillary finally clinched the Democratic Presidential nomination, the U.S. media became “100 percent united, vehemently, [in lockstep] against Trump, and preventing him from being elected president.”
In the early 1970s, trust in the news media was about 70 percent. By September 2016, Gallup was reporting that American trust and confidence in the mass media to ‘report the news fully, accurately, and fairly’ had dropped to its lowest level in polling history, with only 32 percent saying they had a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. That was down eight points from 2015. Among Republicans, only 14 percent had confidence in the media
As Mollie Hemingway, Senior Editor at The Federalist, highlights in Trump vs. The Media:
Two weeks before the 2016 election, a Suffolk University/USA Today poll asked one thousand Americans what they thought was the primary threat to election integrity. 44.5 percent of those polled chose ‘the media’ as the primary threat to election integrity. Only 10 percent chose ‘foreign interests such as Russian hackers.’ That same poll showed that voters believed members of the media were aiding Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate for president. In fact, they were ten times more likely to say the media, including major newspapers and television stations, wanted Hillary Clinton to win.
It wasn’t just the public’s distrust in the media that was fueling Trump’s campaign, however. It was his populist platform. The frothing-at-the-mouth outrage from the elitist Democrat and #NeverTrump factions was even more telling. After all, Trump was hardly your typical “Republican.” On the biggest issues of the day – foreign policy, infrastructure, trade, even healthcare – Trump was running to the left of Hillary Clinton.
American political analyst, historian, and journalist Thomas Frank, a liberal Democrat (not to mention the author of Listen Liberal: Or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?), eloquently contextualizes this moment in The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism:
Just as in 1936, ‘affinity among the elites’ included professional economists, 370 of whom signed an open letter urging people not to vote for Donald Trump. It also included the press, with journalists taking Clinton’s side as a matter of Learning Class solidarity. In the newspaper endorsement race, she defeated Trump overwhelmingly, winning the editorial support of fifty-seven of the country’s largest papers to Trump’s two. Of the money donated by journalists to a presidential campaign, 96 percent of it went to Clinton. Nearly every media polling operation asserted that Clinton would win the election easily.
However, the election of Donald Trump to the presidency on the night of November 8, 2016 proved, once again, ‘just as [it had] in 1936’ (if you’re keeping track, that’s exactly four turnings of twenty years) that Americans don’t appreciate having their good intentions weaponized against them. When the results came in and democracy actually prevailed, the grift was up. Certainly there are many a books and articles out there that fully capture the vivid twenty four-seven conniption fits that followed…and then some. The elites went apoplectic. The proverbial toothpaste, that we do, in fact, have a rigged system based on global crony capitalism, was out the tube. The Rorschach test was complete.
TO REFLECT, OR NOT TO REFLECT, THAT IS THE QUESTION.
“What happens when you have two parties who are in bed with management? You get Donald Trump.”
– Jimmy Dore, The Joe Rogan Experience
In a healthy democracy, a period of ruling class introspection would have followed Trump’s victory. However, as Oren Cass writes in The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America, what followed was anything but:
The economic, social, and political upheaval of 2016 should have triggered a rethinking of priorities and agendas on all sides. Yet rather than embrace that opportunity, or even acknowledge the need to change course, people pleased with the status quo reacted to the ungratefulness of the masses with equal measures of indignation and obstinacy. Some concluded that typical voters must be either too stupid to recognize how good they have it or else too close-minded to put aside their provincial fears and embrace the wonderful modern world created for them. Others took the dissatisfaction more seriously and attributed it to the inadequate implementation of existing approaches.
The backlash, the ‘Revolt of the Elites’ that Lasch had predicted, became manifest. The vicious, pompous, nasty, venomous fingerpointing (fingers pointed down, mind you) was relentless. The excuse list was infinite. And, as for a willingness to entertain the idea that perhaps some level of elite failure may have played just even the tiniest role in the election’s outcome?
Now that is a good one.
Even before Trump won, the professional goalpost movers in our chattering class made no bones about what they deemed to be today’s most ‘pressing political problem.’ As Jonathan Rauch, a contributing editor to The Atlantic put it, “Neurotic hatred of the political class is the country’s last universally acceptable form of bigotry … Our most pressing political problem today is that the country has abandoned the establishment, not the other way around.”
A quick glance at how major institutions donated paints a portrait that more closely resembles North Korea than America. Members of the ruling class – in both major political parties, the Mainstream Media, in Corporate America, in Academia, in Silicon Valley (Employees who work at Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon sent a total of $3 million to the Democratic presidential nominee ahead of the 2016 election on Tuesday, compared to just over $50,000 to her Republican challenger), in Hollywood (Entertainment sources contributed $22 million to Clinton, compared to less than $290,000 for Trump), on Wall Street (Hedge Funds alone donated $123 million to Hillary Clinton and $19,000 to Donald Trump), and in the bureaucracy and national security apparatus (95% of Federal government employees donated to Hillary Clinton) – had been entirely united on one side (Hilary outraised Trump 20-to-1 among Billionaires), and, yet, voters, ‘the people’, pulled the lever for the other guy.
In March 2017, Trump’s biggest tech supporter, American billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, author of Zero to One and the co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund (not to mention the first outside investor in Facebook) expanded upon one of the main points he made during his speech at the 2016 RNC, specifically that that the tide was finally going out on globalization. At the HIS Markit conference in Houston, Thiel said the following:
No one in their right mind would start an organization with the word ‘global’ in its title today. That’s so 2005, it feels so dated…A decade ago, [Davos] was a group of people who were running the world. And now, it’s just a group of people who messed up the world.
A year later, Thiel, noted for his contrarian business philosophy, admitted to Vox that supporting Trump “was [actually] one of the least contrarian things [he] ever did.” He wasn’t being sarcastic. Meanwhile, rather than hear Thiel out and look in the mirror, these very same Anti-populist ‘Davos’ elites, those supposedly enlightened, smug, and self-satisfied Beltway and C-Suite keepers of the corrupt status quo, continued to convey that they just couldn’t be bothered. In fact, they continued to double-down on perhaps the most militant expression of denial the country had ever seen, in the process repeatedly spilling the beans as it pertains to the lengths that they were willing to go in order to not only hold on to their existing power (which they view as a means unto itself, rather than as a means to an end), but to expand upon it even further.
To even the most casual observer, it became increasingly clear that these scold jockeys truly believed that it was not them, the so-called ‘experts,’ who needed to reflect, but the ungrateful, backwards Middle-America red hats who voted for the bad orange man. After all, how could they have voted for a pussy-grabbing game show host who rawdogged porn stars over someone who went to Yale, kept hot sauce in her purse, and promised to continue to carry the torch of ruling class #PantsuitNation orthodoxy? It just didn’t make any sense! In fact, the mere suggestion that an uncouth and uncivilized populist sentiment could even exist in the country, in spite of their unmatched never-to-be-questioned genius, was itself an abomination.
So they tweeted. And they marched. And they shouted. And they tweeted and shouted some more. “#Resist!” ‘#Resist’ what? Reality? Give us a break. Voters elected The Donald because he was the only person truly willing to give them a voice (whether he delivered for them is a another topic for another time).
The cream always rises to the top, or so the elites told themselves. We most definitely don’t have a faux meritocracy that emphasizes connections, credentials, and intersectional box-checking over actual competency, skill, or talent, or so the elites told themselves. Political corruption really – no joke – began on January 20, 2017 (because, of course, all of human history began on said day), or so the elites told themselves. We are genuinely the best and the brightest, or so the elites had been told (and continue to tell themselves to this day).
If you can overlook the obliteration of the middle class, deindustrialization (from 2000 to 2010 alone, the U.S. lost 55,000 factories and 6 million manufacturing jobs), outsourcing, never-ending pointless foreign wars, terrible trade deals (America’s trade deficit grew 600% after NAFTA was passed), unchecked illegal immigration as a result of a wide open “border” (and that’s being generous), the financial crisis (not to mention Wall Street’s ownership of the federal government), the opioid epidemic, the breakdown of the American family, student loan debt, the accumulation of nearly thirty trillion in debt, looking the other way as Big Tech (Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple) amassed more power than the robber barons of the Gilded Age could have ever dreamed of (and then some), not to mention increasingly soviet levels of political correctness, censorship, and routine attacks on free speech that prevent anyone from having an honest conversation about any of these issues in the first place (and these are just a few of the items of business), it’s easy to see how and why the elites might not be able to do any reflecting (insert sarcasm font here) on their little role in current events.
For the briefest moment in time, even New York Times columnist David Brooks, one of the most vehement Trump critics, seemed to have a crisis of conscience, admitting to PBS Newshour’s Judy Woodruff that “Those of us who are trying to rebut populists like Trump have the disadvantage that our elites really do stink.”
WOKE CAPITAL (I.E. HELL ON EARTH)
A quick audit of reality unfortunately reveals that the 1990’s are over. PC isn’t just going to blow over. In fact, as a reaction to Trump becoming President (itself largely a backlash to what was already an overbearing PC culture in its own right), PC has actually, well, gotten even friggin’ worse! That’s right, “Wokeness,” a hodgepodge of horrible ideas (see “cancel culture”) that allows the most privileged and entitled people on the planet to play underdog (see Kara Swisher and Bob Woodward bending over backwards to defend poor widdle Jeff Bezos’ “privacy” back in 2019 while simultaneously never defending the privacy of actual Americans and conveniently ignoring that Amazon paid $0 in taxes on $11.2 Billion in profits during the previous fiscal year) despite of the fact that literally every single major institution in the country is on their side. As Candace Owens, host of The Daily Wire’s Candace tweeted in October 2020, “I don’t know who needs to hear this but… if you find yourself agreeing with the mainstream media, the millionaire celebrities, and the billionaire tech owners— you are not a part of the ‘resistance’. You’re a programmed sheep.”
“Wokeness,” so to speak, is now the dominant secular theology of our ruling class.
If ever there were an ideology that could finally bring America to her knees, pushing all your chips in on “Woke Capital” would be a remarkably safe bet. In Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution, Tucker Carlson writes:
The marriage of market capitalism to progressive social values may be the most destructive combination in American economic history. Someone needs to protect workers from the terrifying power of market forces, which tend to accelerate change to intolerable levels and crush the weak. For generations, labor unions filled that role. That’s over. Left and right now agree that a corporation’s only real responsibility is to its shareholders. Companies can openly mistreat their employees (or ‘contractors’), but for the price of installing transgender bathrooms they buy a pass. Shareholders win, workers lose. Bowing to the diversity agenda is a lot cheaper than raising wages.
A pessimist might see that the very same people who have been decrying the supposed death of democracy the loudest over the past five years have also been the ones most eager to embrace the ‘diversity agenda’ of Woke Capital, ‘the most destructive’ force in American economic history, and come to the conclusion that these folks are actually the most eager to kill democracy (you know, after it actually worked for once). This same pessimist might also see how the GOP Establishment successfully co-opted and subverted MAGA (just as it did with the Tea Party) into Zombie Reaganism with a red hat, not to mention how the DNC Establishment successfully co-opted and subverted Bernie’s “Revolution” (just as it did with Occupy Wall Street) into, well, who even knows at this point. Finally, this same pessimist might just come to the conclusion that no matter how one plays the game in this casino, the house always wins.
Perhaps.
That is, of course, until now.
REBUILDING AMERICA (FIRST)
Given everything we’ve discussed up this point, it’s not unreasonable to say that at this moment, perhaps more than any time ever in our nation’s history, America and her citizens have to handle their business at home. We have to fix the problems at home. As Trump said in his first debate with Hillary in 2016, “We cannot be the policemen of the world.” The reason that this is so important to us here at ADVANCED CITIZENSHIP is because we are all about making America strong, because the best thing America can do for the rest of the world is to be the strongest it can be.
Globalism, by its very nature, is not democratic. How could it be? Global bureaucrats are not accountable to the people. However, the ADVANCED CITIZEN isn’t an isolationist or someone who begrudges international cooperation. There’s nothing controversial about the idea that America should look out for its own interests, just like any other Nation-state should look out for theirs. Wanting to put the interests of one’s own country and fellow citizens above the interests of other nations isn’t “racist” or “nativist” or whatever other nonsense some useful idiot claims it is. It is common sense patriotism.
Does this mean that America can’t work with other countries when it is in its best interest to do so? Absolutely not. Does this mean America can’t help those in need? Of course not. It does mean, however, that it cannot be our top priority until we handle our business at home. Again, wanting to preserve the sovereignty of one’s nation, which is defined by its borders, is not “isolationist”. At the end of the day, the soul of a nation is its citizenry, those individuals who reside within its borders.
As Steve Hilton writes in Positive Populism: Revolutionary Ideas to Rebuild Economic Security, Family, and Community in America:
Nation-states have long benefited from exchange of people, goods, and ideas with other countries. But something that for centuries was a natural and organic expression of human curiosity and ingenuity has more recently become fetishized as an absolute and mechanistic end in itself, as elitists have subjugated the notion of nationhood to globalism, something they see as more righteous and noble. But it’s neither righteous nor noble to place the interests of the corporate bottom line (driven, of course, by personal finance incentives to do so) ahead of the interests of working people in your own country – your neighbors. Globalism’s tangible impact is seen in the decision to relocate the factory, to ‘offshore’ the call center, to discontinue the product and brand in favor of one that can be sold in the same way everywhere on earth [because it’s] more ‘efficient.’
As leading conservative thinker Yoram Hazony writes in The Virtue of Nationalism, “A nationalist order is the only realistic safeguard of liberty in the world today… It is this tradition we must restore if we want to limit conflict and hate — and allow human difference and innovation to flourish.”
SO, NOW WHAT?
Bernie Sanders was right on when he proclaimed, “The corporate media ignores the rise of oligarchy. The rest of us shouldn’t.” Thankfully, however, denial is an ailment that we don’t have here at ADVANCED CITIZENSHIP. In the end, American citizens are smart enough to know when they see an ‘oligarchy’ pretending to be a democracy.
As Thomas Frank suggests in The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism:
There is another way. There is a tradition that trusts in the people, that responds to their needs, that turns resentment into progress. That same populist tradition is and has always been at war with monopoly, with corporate authority, with billionaire privilege, with inequality. It insists and has always insisted that ‘too few people control too much of the money and power.
That’s right. The p-word. Populism, baby!
The data on this matter is the real deal. As of 2015, Populists (defined here as voters who want to either maintain or increase Social Security, while decreasing immigration) actually make up the largest electorate in the country at 40.3% (we can only begin to imagine how this bloc has expanded since). In other words, the majority of the country is not only more multidimensional than hardcore Cable news narratives would tell us, but also this said majority is (intentionally) marginalized and underserved by a small, vocal minority of donors (Business Republicans and Political conservatives make up the smallest portion of the electorate at 3.8% and 2.4%, respectively) and their puppets in the Uniparty establishment. And, while those who pull the strings in this country may be able to kick the can down the road given their immense resources (and, make no mistake, they are immense), ‘the people’ are nonetheless continuing to wake up to how depraved those in power really are.
ADVANCED CITIZENS of the greatest nation in history are sick and tired of being gaslit by respective establishments that have given up the façade of even pretending to care about them. Alas, enough is enough. As Democratic Presidential nominee Marianne Williamson told New York Magazine:
There’s a political and media elite filled with — they are not a monolith, but sometimes the political media elite talks about what the people think through the filter of what they think. They think people aren’t ready. That’s not my experience! My career doesn’t show me that people aren’t ready! My experience is that people on the left or the right are more than ready. It’s the 21st century!
Damn straight, Marianne! We see you!
That is why we need you, our fellow truthseekers.
That is why we need you, our fellow ADVANCED CITIZENS.
You see, ADVANCED CITIZENSHIP isn’t just here to diagnose current problems. We’re here to also offer up possible solutions. We’re here to have conversations and to highlight the most important thought leaders of a vibrant new populist movement that must be built from the bottom up and not from the top down. We’re here to not only help develop and create new elites, but to hopefully also recruit some of the oldies but goodies as well. We’re here because, well, we’ve got to start somewhere!
ADVANCED CITIZENSHIP is what America needs right now. She requires an ADVANCED CITIZENRY that is, yes, willing to call out elitist foul play, but one that is also ready to bring facts to the table and test the marketplace of ideas so that it can offer productive notes for the next round of revisions.
ADVANCED CITIZENSHIP is here to help build infrastructure for a realistic, pragmatic, and achievable path forward. In other words, if you’re looking for mindless tribalism, we’re probably not your tribe (no pun intended). However, if you’re looking for nuance, to make alliances that fall outside the traditional Left/Right paradigm (our fake partisan elites would only too much love to see this dynamic continue to play out), we have got you covered. You might even call us Equal Opportunity Offenders, because we view the pressing matters of the day by examining the plays, not just the players and the teams. When we look in the mirror, we don’t see Team R or Team D. We see Team America. After all, as Ralph Nader famously observed, “The only difference between the Republican and Democratic parties is the velocities with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock on their door.” In other words, we’re not interested in your party affiliation. What matters is that you want to make sure that the people that ‘the people’ send to Washington are actually held accountable.
MAXIMIZING (ADVANCED) CITIZENSHIP VALUE
Some of you reading this right now might flinch at the mere utterance of the name Steve Bannon, former White House Chief Strategist, political strategist, media executive, and investment banker. However, it is our belief that Bannon, a former Goldman Sachs executive-turned-Hollywood Movie Producer, raised in a Democratic, blue-collar, union family before joining the Navy and becoming a Reagan Republican, is perhaps the most misrepresented and misunderstood public figure of our modern era.
In his opening Tucker Carlson Tonight monologue on August 18, 2017 (the day Bannon was canned from his Senior White House Advisor post in the Trump administration after an internal power struggle that had been raging for months), Carlson offered his thoughts on the man.
Like his now former boss, Bannon was a mercurial figure in a business that prizes predictability. To steal clichés from a hundred different cop movies, he was a loose cannon who didn’t play by the rules. Bannon fanned fruitless controversies with unwise remarks, he specialized in making enemies, the White House will be a much more placid place now that he’s gone. The question is will it be a better place? Let’s put it this way. Bannon was relatively one of the few senior staff in the White House who wouldn’t feel at home in a Hillary Clinton administration. Indeed…he was one of the only populist conservatives [there]. That’s strange, since populist conservatism is the platform his boss ran on. Like Trump the candidate, Bannon was willing to criticize big Republican donors and their ideological stranglehold on a corrupt GOP establishment. He was willing to break with Republican orthodoxy in big and dramatic ways, calling for higher taxes on the investor class, better infrastructure, fewer pointless wars around the world, and more. Bannon understood that the country’s greatest crisis isn’t Robert E. Lee’s statues, but the steady economic and moral decline of its once robust middle class. Not surprisingly, traders on Wall Street cheered when he got fired this afternoon. The Dow shot up a hundred points on the news. Lobbyists in Washington will be celebrating late into the night. The funny thing is in that some important ways, Steve Bannon was more traditionally liberal than the liberals who spent the last year shrieking for his head. Not that you’d know that from the coverage. Everything is identity politics now, so his ideological opponents attacked Bannon from the very beginning as a bigot. It was always a ludicrous charge. Bannon is a flawed guy, but not in that way. Just yesterday he called White Nationalists ‘buffoons’ and ‘losers’. It’s not Steve Bannon who’s obsessed with race and identity, it’s the activist left and the morons who do their bidding in the media.
Carlson went on to conclude:
There was never any real attempt in the press to understand or critique what Bannon was saying. Ideas and policy are not interesting to reporters. Mindless tribalism is so that’s what they cover. This is toxic. It obscures the issues that actually matter. Instead of looking at real problems like rampant drug addiction or economic inequality, and those are real problems, and trying to find solutions to them, the [media] is obsessed with finding and destroying the imagined racists in our midst. With Bannon gone, they’ll move onto somebody else … Say what you will about Steve Bannon, and you could say a lot, but he never forgot why Trump got elected in the first place. And, in a democracy, that is not a small thing.
‘Not a small thing’ is right. And, to Carlson’s point, in many ways, Bannon was and remains ‘more traditionally liberal’ than the self-proclaimed ‘liberals’ that inexplicably hate him. After all, this is a man who has said “President Bush 43 will go down in history as the single most destructive in the United States – and I include James Buchanan in that, the president before the Civil War.” In a startling concession, even Thomas Frank admits:
[Bannon] swiped the outrage that should have belonged to the Left. Democratic officeholders never really contested his grab for it, of course: their energy was all going into claiming that everything was OK, that the problem had been solved, that there was no reason for the economic grievances expressed by people like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders…Bannon [had identified] society’s true dominant class, [saying] ‘We have socialism in the United States for the very wealthy, and the very poor, and a brutal form of Darwinian capitalism for everybody else.’
Bannon defines this ‘true dominant class’ as one filled with rotten elites who have committed an “economic hate crime” against working-class Americans. In Bannon’s calculation, these elites are defined by the fact that they are only “for themselves and not for the[ir] country,” as they believe that they can only get ahead in the modern economy by playing a zero-sum game at the expense of everyday Americans.
Now take a second to let all that sink in. Does the hatred towards this man from the corporate media seem at all rooted in reality or logic?
At ADVANCED CITIZENSHIP, we believe that we must prove these elites wrong by developing tangible ideas that ensure a rising tide to lift all boats. And we can. That’s what differentiates us from other outlets. Despite how our ruling class thinks, we genuinely believe that there is no reason that the country can’t strive towards forming a more perfect union, one wherein citizens can aspire to live The American Dream while simultaneously being for their country. We believe that ordinary, everyday, working Americans are the real heroes of the American story.
Radical stuff, we know.
To that end, we are aware that some major misconceptions about populism exist. One is that Populism is concerned with anyone’s immutable characteristics. Another is that it is a scary, frightening term that should only be applied to extremists.
Allow us to be crystal clear. The Populism of ADVANCED CITIZENSHIP is not remotely interested in your race, religion, gender, sexual preference, or this, that, and the other thing. It only cares about your worldview as it pertains to what it means to be an American citizen, an ADVANCED CITIZEN, within and beyond our borders. Furthermore, Populism, as a political strategy, is not intended to be a permanent solution. Rather, it is predicated upon the understanding that a course correction must occur in order for the working and middle class to have equal opportunity. Speaking to New York magazine, Bannon accepts the premise that if the 1980’s and the way we got into our current debacle is the result of the introduction of the radical concept of maximization of shareholder value into our lexicon, the path forward at ADVANCED CITIZENSHIP is ‘simple’:
We’re going to maximize the value of citizenship. We’re going to maximize citizenship value. If you’re an American citizen, you get a special deal. I don’t care if you’re Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, black, white, red, pink, green. I do not care. If you’re an American citizen, you get a better deal.
If you’re an ADVANCED CITIZEN, you ‘get a better deal’. Period. End of story. Bannon expanded on this framework in a fiery 2017 address to the California GOP, proclaiming, “We are not an economy. We are a country. We have a social fabric and a civic responsibility…we are a civic society [and] more than [just] an economy.”
Hear, hear!
LEFT VS. RIGHT IS AN ILLUSION. IT’S POPULISTS VS. ELITISTS.
“It used to be the administration’s job to make rules. It used to be us against them. Now it’s us against us … What’s going on here is about America. It’s about democracy. It’s about the Bill of Rights!”
– Droz, PCU (1994)
ADVANCED CITIZENSHIP is all about finding a sufficient amount of glue to keep the aforementioned ‘social fabric’ together. Surely, Secular Talk host Kyle Kulinski (an individual who identifies as a man of the Left) would agree, having told Joe Rogan in 2019 that “The strongest divide in the country is not Right versus Left. The strongest divide in the country [is] Populists versus Elitists. You have Elitists in the Democratic Party. You have Elitists in the Republican Party. And you have the people. And the people are so much more in agreement than [we] get credit for.”
Boom.
‘Left’ and ‘Right’. ‘Liberal’ and ‘Conservative’. These labels are just no longer meaningful in the way that they once were. And, given Wall Street’s takeover of the government, neither are “Socialism” and “Capitalism”. The true divide of our time is between ‘Populists’ and Anti-populist ‘Elitists’.
Our ruling class doesn’t want you to notice that Populists across the political spectrum can and should work together. In the most cynical way, this makes perfect sense. Why would they? For them, the status quo works! Of course they’re going to be Anti-Populists! Populism is, by definition, a rejection of the worldview that they put into practice. Rather, it is a movement that champions honest, hard-working people, strong communities, and positive change.
One of the most important components of politics is identifying the problem, and while Trump and Bernie may not have entirely agreed on their respective Populist solutions in 2016, they certainly saw eye-to-eye when it came to problem identification, including the current status quo’s seething, unjustified contempt for the little guy.
ADVANCED CITIZENSHIP rejects a politics of contempt for the little guy. It is the antithesis of our brand of Populism. We’re not here to preach, moralize, or proselytize. Our brand is based (literally and figuratively) on problem solving for fellow ADVANCED CITIZENS who crave meaning and purpose while helping restore America to her greatness.
Consider the following thought experiment.
How many people do you personally know realize that Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has worked with former Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on legislation to audit the Federal Reserve? Or that Sanders voted to kill W. Bush’s amnesty proposal in 2007? Or that Steve Bannon agrees with Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) that Big Tech monopolies need to be broken up? As Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL) writes in Firebrand: Dispatches from the Front lines of the MAGA Revolution:
To maximize the odds of Congress working for you – to get both parties to cut spending, chop away at red tape, tackle the debt – we will have to replace the quiet but immense scam the two-party aristocracy has perpetuated with a populist sense of urgency and non-crony priorities. That will have to mean some turnover in Congress [and] working with the populists on the Left when it suits us strategically … I’ve sponsored legislation with Bernie Sanders’s national campaign cochairman Rep. Ro Khanna to stand against Middle East wars. AOC and I have taken on the drug companies to research and democratize access to marijuana, MDMA, and psilocybin for veterans. Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California and I work together to stop warrantless government spying on Americans. This is a more productive, populist bipartisanship way to take on the establishment of both parties!
Nailed it!
At ADVANCED CITIZENSHIP, we’re all about a more ‘productive, populist bipartisan way to take on the establishment of both parties!’ We’re human after all, and, as such, we, too, are biased. Our worldview is a populist one that cannot be distinctly categorized by Right or Left. Our primary interest is highlighting stories that will uplift the working-class and middle-class, the backbone of the country. The rise of Trump and Sanders did not occur in a vacuum, and, as such, it only makes sense for populists on the ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ to work together.
The good news is that we are hardly alone in ringing the Populist alarm. Political commentator Steve Hilton has named his proposed set of bold reforms “Positive Populism”. Populist public policy commentator and founder of American Compass, Oren Cass, has coined the term “Productive Populism” for his suggested treatment. On Breaking Points, Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti get their ADVANCED CITIZENSHIP on daily. Tucker Carlson is killing it on a nightly basis. Civil Libertarians and populists across the political spectrum – individuals like Pedro Gonzalez (keep an eye out for this one, he’s a killer), Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Sohrab Ahmari, Ryan Girdusky, Jimmy Dore, Salena Zito, Anna Khachiyan (just to name a few – there are so many!) – are doing the best work of their career (we see you, CSPI Center). Watching former partisan rivals putting aside ideological differences to work towards a better future for our shared country is a beautiful thing, and it’s exactly the kind of real, authentic “unity” we look forward to celebrating here at ADVANCED CITIZENSHIP.
We have plenty of reasons to be hopeful and optimistic about the future. If we ignore the shiny garbage and stay focused on the big picture, there’s nothing a truly ADVANCED CITIZENRY can’t achieve. The sky really is the limit.
Sure, the last decade has hardly been what anyone would describe as smooth sailing. Nevertheless, we have never had more clarity about what is required to succeed going forward. If it’s going to continue to be us versus the establishment, it is the establishment that should be scared of us, and not the other way around. After all, there are more of us than there are of them.
America isn’t an “idea”. It’s a real, physical place that must be protected against all enemies foreign and domestic, anyone who would do her harm. The Founders gave us the best ingredient list of-all time for this extremely patriotic smoothie we call “America,” we just have to repeal and replace some of the buffoons currently stationed at the blender. America and her people deserve better than the current crop of professional criminals, many of whom would likely get triggered by the mere exclamation “of the people, by the people, for the people”.
Real Americans are Advanced Citizens, because America requires advanced citizenship in order to work. That being said no one is going to give it to us, so we’re going to have to take it. As Krystal Ball, the wise Progressive co-host of Breaking Points (famously silenced by MSNBC for daring to ask former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton not to run for President) writes in The Populists Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising:
You can’t saddle the line between establishment and anti-establishment. You’re either in or you’re out … You can’t be a revolutionary who is non-threatening to the establishment. In the end, you will just be unsatisfying to all.
We don’t know where along the way being an ADVANCED CITIZEN became synonymous with being a ‘revolutionary,’ but Krystal is 100% right. And, alas, we are where we are.
ADVANCED CITIZENSHIP belongs to you, real patriots with real skin in the game, because citizenship and love of country should be the real identity politic of the day. No matter what state you live in, you’re an American, and, as such, you hold enough common values with your fellow citizens to have real solidarity.
If you’ve made it this far, you clearly have a vested interest in America’s future. You love America too much to just sit on the sidelines. The big question going forward, then, as Thomas Frank concludes in The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, is as follows:
For whom does America exist? Its billionaires? Its celebrities? Its tech companies? Are we the people just a laboring, sweating instrument for the bonanza paydays of our betters? Are we just glorified security guards, obeying orders to protect their holdings? Are we nothing more than a vast test market to be tracked and probed and hopefully sold on airline tickets, fast food, or Hollywood movies featuring some awesome new animation technology? Or is it the other way around – are they supposed to serve us? This time around, there can be only one possible answer.
So, without further adieu, let’s do this!
BECOME AN ADVANCED CITIZEN TODAY!
The concentration of power in the hands of a handful of multinational corporations that engage in unfair labor practices that crush the opportunities of working Americans is a hot mess. Not only do these monopolies hurt the public interest, but they also they make it increasingly difficult for upstarts to enter the market and challenge incumbents. Who knows if and when Crony dweebs in D.C. will do something about it, so, in the meantime, we’ve got to start building our own institutions outside of the corrupt, hollow, bought-and-paid-for existing ones.
As a big tent populist outlet, we need your help to make moves. That’s why there will eventually be a charge to become an ADVANCED CITIZEN, though we promise we will do everything in our power to make it worth your while by putting out hot fire on a consistent basis.
We are a truly Independent media outlet. As such, we are dedicated to fully and completely rejecting the Hate, Inc. business model (sorry, certain Boomers). If we wanted to make a quick, easy buck, we could go for the low-hanging fruit and start another “Own the Libs” or “Drumpf is Mean” site. Suffice to say, we’re not interested in that (again, this is in spite of that being an extremely effective business model). We’re putting our money where our mouth is in order to build an informative and fun experience for our fellow ADVANCED CITIZENS, for people like YOU!
A recent study from the Media Insight Project, a collaboration between API (AMERICAN PRESS INSTITUTE) and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, reveals that the majority of Americans embrace “factualism,” i.e. the idea that the more facts we have in a society, the more likely we are to solve problems. Well, ask and you shall receive. If the people demand facts, we will supply them. We know you have busy lives, so it is our hope that when you become an ADVANCED CITIZEN, we can help take the edge off, even if just a little. We hope you’ll register for a free account and become an ADVANCED CITIZEN today.