What we have is much worse than a king
What we have is much worse than a king. Another round of protests erupted, another round of the “no kings” thing. These irk me, not because I am a Trump supporter, but because I think we’re being deceived and misdirected from the real, much worse, problem. A king is a known thing. An easy target. What I mean is, there are centuries of histories of kings gone rogue, with examples of the populace exgorging them in different fashions. The idea that America is sick from a single leader (at this point really just a Great British Monarch, a representational figure head with little actual sway), is an idea that misunderstands the shadowy geopolitical forces that have recently been coming to light. It’s like we are obsessed with a gross-looking mole, when really we have a late stage cancer, have no idea, and most importantly, really don’t want to accept it.
I guess you could say I’ve taken the democracy black pill, as in, we haven’t had a real democracy for quite some time. Of course, socially and symbolically and historically, we do. In some respects, we are the center of the universe in terms of democracy. But in terms of power, all those virtues are more so shields for aggression. The US, Russia, China, Iran, despite the rhetoric, are all more similar than dissimilar, in the sense that they act from selfish geopolitical interest, more than anything else. This is “geopolitical realism.” No country is a representation of their citizens. No one really cares about sovereignty. When things get desperate, inalienable human rights are optional. The US is just the most theatrical in pretending it does. I guess this is Foucault's idea? It all just really comes down to power?
My simplistic assessment of what’s happened is that we were unable to turn off the war machine after WW2. All sorts of emergency measures went in place to enter the war, like massive defense production and intelligence agencies. Those never stopped. They tried, and failed, and Truman warned us. Pair this with Israeli intelligence, and you get the whole Epstein situation. What I’m getting at is that Trump has not acted so differently from the last many US presidents, possibly since Kennedy. We are the paranoid police force of the world, now dangerously neglecting domestic matters. Trump campaigned on defying this machine, on putting American first, and it’s obvious he’s unable to do so; either he was lying, or he found the limits of his own power in the face of more powerful oligarchs, or both. Realistically, he was Chief Dick of one oligarch faction, thinking he could take down another oligarch faction, and failed.
Trump spent the last two decades criticizing a potential war with Iran. I think he knows that this extended conflict will tank his ratings, and the Republican’s chance in the 2026 midterms. Iran was political suicide for him, and he knew that (which maybe explains rumors of his meltdowns behind the scenes). When we see him speaking about the war, lying and flip-flopping and saying whatever he says, those are words of an actor who has no other option now to defend what the callmakers are doing, to control the optics in the least damaging way possible. The seams in the shtick are showing.
So all I’m saying is that the “madman in the White House” is not the primary concern; it’s theatre, and conveniently timed. Trump is the perfect scapegoat, and you could imagine that the geopolitical financiers behind everything saw him as the perfect fall guy, an unignoarble, reasonable explanation for a coming rupture/rapture/reset. If you were a cabal trying to elect some asshole to go down in history for killing America, is there a louder asshole than Trump? What we have is worse than a king, because it’s acephalous, a shadow thing, transnational, unsuspecting, hiding in plain sight, etc. It has such a conglomeration of capital, resources, power, and it’s so distributed and entrenched that there’s no obvious way of bringing it down. We are dealing not with a king, but something more like the shadow monster from Stranger Things.
I realize this sounds like a conspiracy theory, and that’s because it is. We are in the Age of Conspiracy. Ockham’s razor is proving insufficient. The simplest explanations aren't holding up anymore. It seems there are layers and layers of abstractions and lies, all of which are very hard to make sense of, but what were fringe ideas in 2012 are, now in 2026, proving to be true, and as extreme as we thought. This should not be surprising though. Whenever there is a power asymmetry, there is naturally a scheme for those in power to construct narratives, fibs, facades and viels to maintain order among their subjects. Conspiring is a method of peacekeeping. Parents do this. Companies do this. Would governments not?