The Hydra Hypothesis

Not too long ago what I’m about to write here I would have considered a wild conspiracy theory. Now I wonder if I’m paranoid enough.

On the old blog I had a post tag of “Truth in Fiction” where I posted excerpts from books and movies that I thought well reflected current reality. This excerpt from John Ringo’s Road to Damascus, for example:

(The party) is composed of two tiers. The lower tier produces many outspoken members who make their demands known to the upper tier. The lower tier is derived from the inner-city population that serves as the base of the party. The lower tier’s members are generally educated in public school systems and if they aspire to advanced training, they are educated in facilities provided by the state. This wing constitutes the majority of (the party’s) membership, but contributes little or nothing to party theory or platform. It votes the party line and is rewarded with cash payments, subsidized housing, subsidized education, and occasional preferential employment in government positions. The lower tier provides only a handful of clearly token individuals allowed to serve in high offices.

The upper tier, which includes most of the party’s management, virtually all the appointed and elected government officials, and all of the party’s decision-makers, is drawn exclusively from suburban areas where wealth is a fundamental criterion for admittance as a resident. These party members are generally educated at private schools and attend private colleges. They are not affected by food-rationing schemes, income caps or taxation laws, as the legislation drafted and passed by members of their social group inevitably contains loopholes that effectively shelter their income and render them immune from unpleasant statues that restrict the lives of lower-tier party members and all nonparty citizens.

(The party) leadership recognizes that in return for supporting a seemingly populist agenda, they can obtain all the votes they require to remain in power. Even the most cursory analysis of their actions and attitudes, however, indicates that they are not populists but, in fact, are strong antipopulists who actively despise their voting base. This….is proven by their efforts to reduce public educational systems to a level most grade-school children (in other countries) have surpassed, with the excuse that this curriculum is all that the students can handle. They have made the inner-city population base totally dependent on the government, which they control.

A couple of day ago I asked over on Facebook if those in power were interested in significantly reducing world population, what would they be doing differently than they are now? Call it the Thanos Hypothesis.

It didn’t get a lot of traction at the time, but I thought about it off and on afterward, and now it’s brought this überpost about.

I picked the wrong Marvel movie. The right one was Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Bear with me.

Immediately after WWII (hell, probably during WWII) Hydra infiltrates the U.S. government from the bottom all the way to the top. Legislature, courts, executive, and of course, the military. It was probably in other places as well: media, education, etc. Sound familiar?

Hydra followers don’t see themselves as evil. They want what’s best for the world: Peace in our time. Justice. Equality. All it requires is that Hydra be in charge. Because, after all, they’re the best suited to rule. They’re the smartest, they have the best technology. They DESERVE to be in charge. Some are willing to die for the beautiful vision, but a lot more are willing to kill for it.

After all, if they have to kill a few million incalcitrant people to achieve this power, well that’s a small price to pay. Eggs and omelets and all that. You can’t have the deplorable bitter clingers out there mucking everything up with ideas like individual rights and freedoms! No, it will be best when no one (well, none of the peons) owns anything, and everyone will be happy.

Oh, wait… I bled into current reality.

Back before he went full Col. Nicholson, George F. Will gave the keynote speech at the 2010 Milton Friedman prize dinner. It’s an excellent speech I’ve cited numerous times, but not this particular bit:

In 2007 per capita welfare state spending – per capita welfare state spending, adjusted for inflation – was 70% higher than it had been when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated 27 years earlier.

The trend continues and the trend is ominous.

Fifty-one days ago now, the President signed into law the Health Care Reform, the great lunge to complete the New Deal project, and the Great Society project. The great lunge to make us more European. At exactly the moment that this is done the European Ponzi scheme of the social welfare state is being revealed for what it is. There’s a difference.  We are not Europeans. We are not, in Orwell’s phrase, a “state‐​broken people.” We do not have a feudal background of subservience to the state. No, that is the project of the current administration — it can be boiled down to learned feudalism. It is a dependency agenda that I have been talking about ad nauseam.

Two recent examples. First, when the government took over student loans, making it the case that the two most important financial transactions of the average family — a housing mortgage and a loan for college — will now be transactions with the government, they included a provision that said there will be special forgiveness of student loans for those who go to work for the government or for nonprofits. Second, one-third of the recent stimulus was devoted to preserving unionized public employees’ jobs in states and local municipalities. And so it goes. The agenda is constant.

Yes, the agenda is constant, and learned feudalism is the goal, but this goal long predates the Administration in power back in 2010. Back when I first listened to this speech I thought it was a little dramatic, but no longer. Will details how the agenda is to manufacture a subservient general public – subservient, that is, to our political betters. A little later in the speech he says:

Madison said rights pre-exist government. (Woodrow) Wilson said government exists to dispense whatever agenda of rights suits its fancy, and to annihilate, regulate or attenuate or dilute those others. Madison said the rights we are owed are those that are necessary for the individual pursuit of happiness. Wilson and the progressives said the rights you deserve are those that will deliver material happiness to you and spare you the strain and terror of striving.

The result of this is now clear. We see in the rampant indebtedness of our country and the European countries what someone has called “a gluttonous feast on the flesh of the future.” We see the infantilization of publics that become inert and passive, waiting for the state to take care of them. One statistic: 50% of all Americans 55 years old or older have less than $50,000 in savings and investment.

The feast on the flesh of the future is what debt is. To get a sense of the size of our debt, in 1916, midway in Woodrow Wilson’s first term, the richest man in America John D. Rockefeller could have written a personal check and retired the National Debt. Today the richest man in America, Bill Gates, could write a personal check for all his worth and not pay two months interest on the National Debt. Five years from now interest debt service will consume half of all income taxes. Ten years from now the three main entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security plus interest will consume 93% of all federal revenues. Twenty years from now debt service interest will be the largest item in the federal budget.

In point of fact, he wasn’t far off. The 2020 budget ran to $6.6 trillion, $4.9 trillion (74.2%) being entitlements and interest on the debt. That was 153% of federal revenues. We brought in $3.2 trillion. We borrowed the other $3.4 trillion. I don’t think George imagined we’d do such a thing. Had we borrowed “only” $984 billion like we did in 2019, we would have been unable to pay entitlements, with nothing left for interest or discretionary spending, like running the government.

Calvin Coolidge, the last president with whom I fully agreed, once said that when you see a problem coming down the road at you, relax. Nine times out of ten it will go into the ditch before it gets to you. He was wrong about the one we now face. We are facing the most predictable financial crisis, most predictable social and political crisis of our time. And all the political class can do is practice what I call “the politics of assuming a ladder.” That’s an old famous story of two people walking down the road, one’s an economist the other’s a normal American, and they fall into a pit with very steep sides. The normal American at the bottom says “Good lord we can’t get out!” The economists said, “Not to worry, we’ll just assume a ladder.”

This seems to me what is the only approach they have to the Ponzi nature of our own welfare state. I think what it is time for us to understand, that the model that we share in a somewhat attenuated form so far with Europe simply cannot work. It is that on the one hand we should tax the rich, AKA the investing and job creating class, yet count on spending the revenues of investment and job creation. No one has explained to the political class that it is very dangerous to try to leap a chasm in two bounds.

We are now being told that a value-added tax is going to be required. Well, the value-added tax would help the political class to shower benefits on those who can vote for them while taxing people who can’t vote for them. The beauty of the value-added tax is that it taxes everybody but nobody quite notices it.

In 2010 the United States was 13.5 trillion dollars in debt. That’s $13,500,000,000,000. At $1,000 per second, it would take almost 428 years to pay back that money.

The debt today is more than $28,800,000,000,000. And the government is desperate for revenue, while it racks up another $3+ trillion in additional deficit spending. It’s unsustainable. Everyone knows its unsustainable. No one will admit there’s a disaster looming, that the Ponzi scheme is on the verge of collapse.

Not quite no one.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said that the multinational investment bank has started to prepare for a “potentially catastrophic” situation in which the United States could default on the national debt.

They’ve been in this position before, but they know you can’t keep kicking the can down the road forever. So what do I extrapolate from this? Well, the decent, caring, inclusive, tolerant, loving Left has infiltrated every strata of public life. Media, education, and government are theirs almost wholly. They want what’s best for the world, excluding those who oppose their agenda. They are righteous, morally superior, more intelligent and darn it, just plain good. Those who oppose them are evil, and if they cannot be redeemed, they must be destroyed.

Capitalism, they claim, has failed us. They have to break the system. Marx said it had to be done violently. If the National Debt can’t be retired, then it must be the mechanism of destruction. So they’re pushing every button they can to get a response they can overreact to claiming “EMERGENCY!”

It cannot be incompetence. No individual or group is THAT incompetent. (The Biden Administration has nominated an award winner to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Her award? She won a scholarship named for Vladimir Lenin to Moscow State University. You can’t make this stuff up. No one would believe you.)

The agenda is power – for our own good, of course – and they mean to get it. Economic collapse? They’ve already got theirs! (Well, the ones in actual power. The useful idiots? They can die too. After all, they’re usually the first against the wall after the revolution. Ask Robespierre.) Their money is their self-justification for their right to rule. The peons will have to fend for themselves. Is it any wonder now why Bill Gates has been buying farmland? He’ll need serfs to work it. And if a few million have to die to adjust the thinking of the rest, well, they were evil schemers and wreckers anyway. Their carbon footprint won’t be missed.

Ayn Rand wasn’t a prophet, she was simply a scholar of human nature.

I really wish I was kidding. I wish it was just massive incompetence, but it’s deliberate. Regardless, the outlook is frightening. Really, seriously frightening.

Billy Beck has been talking about the Endarkenment for a long time. Billy is a scholar of human nature, too.

May be a Twitter screenshot of text that says 'Axiomatic Enemy of the State @DeTocqueville14 If you've been conscious the last 18 months and have a a modest understanding of history, how can't you understand where this is heading?'
She actually said that.
May be an image of text that says 'Wise Words from a Stockbroker... Edward Jones: April 20, 2021 When asked about what to buy, this stockbroker said: "If the current administration is in office much longer, canned goods, a generator, water and ammunition would be your best investments."'

This doesn’t really surprise me. The Left has never shown any ability to predict second- and third-order effects of their policies. This is going to get very, very ugly, and I honestly don’t think it’s going to take more than a few more years, if that.

10/5/21 – Edited to add:

Michael Ramirez; Plunging Towards Bankruptcy 10-04-21

16 thoughts on “The Hydra Hypothesis

    1. You sneer, but you fail to point out anything that is inaccurate.

      Do you consider sneering to qualify as “reasoned discourse” and “rational debate”? A depressing proportion of leftists appear to do so.

  1. On target essay, sadly. Power is the only goal of the Left, and not for all of them, but only the elite of them (the “revolutionary vanguard” in traditonal Marxist-Leninist terminology). The rest are, as you say, useful idiots, whom the elite consider ultimately to be either irrelevant or disposable. Remember, very soon after World War 2 ended in Europe, the Soviets began killing German communists! German red cells had fed the USSR invaluable, war-shortening intel but they foolishly thought that after the war they would set the course for German communism. Stalin did not agree.

    Remember, the point of Marxist revolutions is not to empower the people, it is to brings the reins of state power to the Marxist revolutionaries. Which always means the Vanguard because for the proles’ own good the vanguard of the revolution (maybe in its fifth generation by now!) must also be the conservators of the revolution. As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen.

    How is this being worked out now? By the unrestricted use of the established Marxist tool of “revolutionary truth.” Which is that any statement or claim that they think advances their power is definitionally “true” and to say otherwise simply marks you as an enemy of the Party.

  2. “This is going to get very, very ugly, and I honestly don’t think it’s going to take more than a few more years, if that.”

    Before the first Tuesday in November, 2022.

    1. For the record, I’m serious when I name that date. I explained why in my “I know how WWIII will start” comment in another thread.

  3. No matter how bad and ugly you think things are and how evil you believe those who are in power are you are wrong. Things are far worse and those in power are for more malevolent than just about anything you can imagine. And that group really is two tiered. The larger group providing the political muscle if you will, the people who are dumb enough to buy into the BS the top tier is selling and who will vote for those selling that BS no matter how bad things get. They are owned by that small top tier who fully understand what the agenda is, how things are manipulated and for whom there is simpy one rule….WIN. At any cost. Even if that cost is untold millions dead.

  4. Those at the top are not well-meaning. If they were, they wouldn’t need a vault of pedo films to keep each other loyal.

    If bad results were due to mistakes, around 1/2 the time the mistakes would be in our favor.

    1. No, those at the top know exactly what they’re doing. It’s the Useful Idiots who believe the propaganda and think they’re doing good.

      1. “…it’s the Useful Idiots who believe the propaganda and think they’re doing good.”

        Which brings us back to The George Orwell Daycare Center postulate; the conditioning has worked when the evidence is reviewed. People, incapable of critical thinking, because they’ve been taught what to “think,” instead of how to think.

        Repeat the lie until it becomes the truth, as Lenin insisted.

  5. Billy Beck calls the heartbreak for what it is:

    https://billybeck.substack.com/p/human-mind-american-way

    “I will contend: America is currently in no serious condition to handle a politics of liberty. All the philosophy necessary to that has been squeezed by mal-education and beaten by force of law out of the culture for whole generations, now.”

    Leaving we few who salt the landscape carrying something that resembles ethics of liberty to be hostages, surrounded and outnumbered.

  6. I have two thoughts on this.

    The first is about populist appeal. Politics is like an ecosystem. No resource goes to waste. If there’s something in abundance that one organism doesn’t use, another one will swoop in to lay claim to that resource. The Democrats claim the populist vote (at least in the big cities, and among non-whites everywhere) and have come to take these people’s votes for granted. Why?

    Because the Republicans didn’t even try to beat them to it. Every voting bloc matters, and the GOP chose to leave this one up for grabs. They were more interested in courting millionaires and billionaires than the fastest growing, large demographics. In a democracy, where offices go to the person with the most votes instead of to the highest bidder, that’s a losing strategy. And rather than pivoting and trying to win the hearts and minds of blacks and Latinos, Republicans try to mitigate their error by blocking as many Democratic votes ask possible. Gerrymandering, reducing the number of voting machines in blue districts, fighting any measure that might make it easier for the poor to have their votes counted–that’s what Republicans do instead of actually trying to win those votes. They just try to throw out all the votes that aren’t for them. This requires a huge amount of resources in order to be pulled off successfully. It’s like a nationwide game of whack-a-mole. I’m frankly surprised Trump didn’t get some Proud Boys or III%er types to bomb some polling places in liberal neighborhoods to scare people away.

    My other thought is that you’re not paranoid enough. You’ve identified two players in this game–Tier 1 and Tier 2 of the Democratic Party–but turned a blind eye to the fact that these same tiers exist within the Republican Party. The upper tier are almost indistinguishable from the upper tier of the Democrats. They go to the same Ivy League schools, join the same secret societies, and rub elbows in the same social circles. Just look how chummy Trump was with the Clintons before he decided to get into politics. For most of these people, party affiliation is about opportunism, not ideology, and they’ll switch if they need to.

    The only notable difference between these two parties is that the Dem elites pretend to care about the poor, tired, huddled masses of immigrants, brown people, and anyone else the Republican elite are openly disgusted by, while the Republican elite pretend to care about rural and suburban, working-class and middle-class white Christians. Not enough to actually DO anything for them, mind you, just to express solidarity and a shared anxiety about those scary people in the city who speak other languages and do freaky sexual things and want to steal your children’s fully semi-automatic Bibles.

    So here’s what I’m seeing: you don’t seem too concerned about ACTUAL leftists–that is, the fringe radicals in the lower tier of the Democratic Party (or way outside to the left of it) who actually DO want to destroy capitalism and give power to the people. You seem confident that the Democratic elites have them successfully under control, and that it’s going to stay that way. Let me know if I’ve misinterpreted your take on that.

    I’m also seeing that while you fear the bloodsucking ghouls of the political elite who identify (for the moment) as Democrats, you’re turning a blind eye to the ones who (for the moment) are identifying as Republicans. I think that’s a dangerous oversight. It’s like America’s enemies fearing our Army and ignoring our Navy. They’re on the same team. They share the same goals. They just have different methods of attack.

    And finally, don’t discount those lower-tier Republicans. You might sympathize with them culturally, and I understand that. But there are factions. Among them are a lot of current and former military and public safety personnel. So far, nobody on the left has been as organized, well-equipped, dedicated to training, and few on the left have been as assertive about taking the initiative to DO something.

    Remember Tim McVeigh? The Michigan Militia? Those Jade Helm guys or the ones who plotted attacks against military bases or Muslim communities? Those guys were all right-wingers. And they didn’t just form a mob to yell at cops and break windows. If (when) things eventually get loud, it’ll be righties pulling the triggers. They’ve been itching for this since Ruby Ridge. Maybe that doesn’t concern you because you think they’re on their side, but with the way splinter groups form amid chaos, we could all be just one loony interpretation of a Bible passage away from being in front of one of their firing squads.

  7. With regards to the Left justifying their takeover saying “Capitalism has failed”, this claim always sticks in my craw.

    The fact is, to the degree that “Capitalism has failed”, it’s because opportunistic people looking for power are always seeking a crisis, however small (or imaginary) to justify their takeover. Successful businesmen will seek regulation and taxes that will kill competition, particularly newcomers, so they could entrench their company and make it a practical monopoly. Politicians will examine the Free Market for problems — no matter how small, or how hypothetical, or even how outright imaginary — and then demand “We need to do something to fix this!”

    And then, inevitably, their “fixes” hamper the economy, customers, workers, and employers are abused, welfare recepients are trapped on welfare cliffs, and competition is stifled … and “Capitalism” has “failed us”. For some reason, government is never to blame for this state of affairs. Instead, we need MOAR GOVERNMENT.

    No, Capitalism hasn’t failed us. Government has. Capitalism — or rather, Free Market Individualism — is the only reason society stays afloat. Even the “mighty” Soviet Union, at its peak, could only exist through a mixture of regular doses of United States aid and turning blind eyes to the black markets of their own citizens — black markets so warped, even food was considered illegal.

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