VACCINES, TRUMP, AND WHAT’S NEXT

A NOTE ON THE CIRCULATION (OR NOT) OF ELITES, TODAY

My plan for this substack has been to take all the time necessary to flesh out the theoretical grounds for the analysis of pathocratic trends before applying such analysis to the present state of the world. However, this thought occurred to me, and I wanted to share it. So, this is a bit of a premature preview. Hopefully though it will be an amusing and interesting digression.

I want to offer here, maybe not anything so bold as a prediction as perhaps a speculation – which may be revealing about the state of our world. That will be up to you to decide. Before I can do so, though, I think it is necessary for me to lay my cards on the table and tell you how I see the current political dynamic, particularly in the U.S., as it relates to the topics addressed by this substack.

So, to start, I share the concerns expressed by the level-headed critics of Donald Trump that he is a dangerous personality to have involved in the nation’s political life. While I see no evidence that he is psychopathic in the narrow sense of that word, associated to anti-social personality disorder, he does partake of the more broadly defined concept of psychopathy, as related to the DSM’s cluster B personality disorders, given his obvious narcissism. This is not a trivial matter, though it may be true that all politicians possess some level of narcissism. Focusing on Donald Trump, personally, however is to entirely miss what’s really happening. He was swept into the Oval Office on the wave of an American populist insurgency, which has been growing among middle and working class people in the country (and indeed around much of the world) in response to the terrible damage done to their lives by the globalist social engineering agenda of the sclerotic and venal ruling faction of the managerial class. Trump was seized upon by them as a weapon against that ruling class faction. The “Russia-gate” conspiracy led against the Trump presidency by the ruling faction of the managerial class was then of course entirely predictable.¹

I am not lapsing into a case of Mosca’s political formula. I’m not entertaining some fantasy of a populist utopia in which the people are redeemed and self-rule their way into some golden age future. As has been discussed elsewhere on this substack, that’s not how the circulation of elites happens. I’m not actually sure that Donald Trump personally qualifies as a member of the managerial class. Despite his having a university degree, that I think is open to question. However, there is no question that virtually all the leading thinkers and communicators of the populist insurgency – e.g., Steve Bannon, Michael Anton, Tucker Carlson, Amanda Milius, Darren Beattie, Jack Posobiec, J.D. Vance, Peter Navarro, Jack Murphy, Robert Barnes, and so on – are members of the managerial class. They are, what has been identified here as the rebel faction in a managerial intra-class coup. An effective populist victory² would bring this rebel faction into power. This would mean two things. First, again, no populist utopia is going to result. But second, it is likely that the conditions of life for middle Americans will improve – possibly for as long as a couple generations. This is all entirely consistent with my analysis of the circulation of elites, here.

With that groundwork laid, now – hopefully without any misunderstanding or misrepresentation (wishful thinking, I know) – I can get into the heart of the point I wanted to make in this post. I’ve recently been wondering what can possibly lay in the future for the regime of aggressive mandates of the COVID vaccine.³ As both the effectiveness and robustness of the vaccines become increasingly suspect, with calls for biannual boosters and acknowledgment that since the vaccines do not sterilize the virus the vaccinated can spread it, I’ve pondered both why governments around the world continue to double down on their draconian, and strangely narrow (not taking account of either acquired or herd immunity) policies and what a possible way out of all this might be for them. It seems that all this is trending toward blowing up in their faces. However sclerotic or self-absorbed the ruling faction of the managerial class may be, they’re not stupid. Where are they going with all this? And, today, it occurred to me.

To set the stage for this revelation, we must cast our minds back into the misty past of 2020. Donald Trump was president, and we were faced with what, at least initially (based on now clearly misinformation coming out of China), appeared as though it might be a society-threatening virus. There was much criticism of how Trump handled the U.S. federal government’s response. I have no interest in re-adjudicating all those arguments.⁴ I only want to focus on the Trump presidency’s initiative to fast-track the development of a vaccine. In fairness, it is worth pointing out that many who remain dedicated Trump supporters seem to condemn the vaccine with a rather short memory of how it got here. However, it is the anti-Trump side — which really means the anti-populist side, which really means the sclerotic, venal, globalist wing of the ruling faction of the managerial class — that I want to focus on here.

It’s easy to forget now, but those who most aggressively push the full range of draconian vaccine policies today – back when Trump as president was overseeing the development of these vaccines – were considerably less Panglossian about the them. The usual approach then was to say that if the vaccines arrived prior to the election, that fact alone would be evidence that they were unsafe and/or entirely politically motivated — as indeed was any promise that they would arrive prior to the election.⁵ Of course, the cynical observer can’t help noting that the arrival of the vaccines prior to the election would have given Trump an electoral surge, and so the ever-clever managerial class operatives had to reframe such an eventually to offset the danger of such a surge. In any event, with hindsight, the accusation of Trump politicizing the vaccines seems quaintly ironic. Of course, he was, as were they. They were just better at it than him.

My point, here, though, is how the objections that the vaccines couldn’t be trusted because Trump was somehow interfering in the scientific process to advance his electoral ambitions instantly disappeared down the Orwellian memory hole. And now those who once accused Trump of politicizing vaccine development for opportunistic electoral purposes (which he obviously was) have made an utter joke of those objections by increasingly turning vaccination into a loyalty test for fealty to the ruling, globalist wing of the managerial class. While this turning of vaccination into a loyalty test emphasizes the brazenness of the operation, it is its effectiveness that I’m highlighting here. An extraordinary number of people seem to have entirely forgotten the skepticism, over the development process of these very same vaccines, trumpeted by those loyal to the ruling, globalist wing of managerial class, back when that skepticism was expedient for removing Trump and – more importantly – suppressing the middle American populist insurgency (along with, of course, the nationalist, rebel faction of the managerial class, which might constitute a genuine threat to the former’s power).   

This brings us back around to the answer to my question about “what is the way out” for the globalist wing of the ruling faction of the managerial class, as the vaccine narrative increasingly crumbles. Never doubt their skill at manipulating Orwell’s memory hole. Just as they turned on a dime, at the end of 2020, from the dangerous “Trump vaccine” to vaccination as a loyalty test, so can they turn back again. As it becomes increasingly clear to everyone that the vaccines’ immunity is insufficient in potency and durability, I expect at some point, when they decide it’s time to bail out on the vaccine regime, out of the blue we will start hearing again about the failure of the “Trump vaccine.” This is the legacy of Trump’s presidency, we will be told: a rushed vaccine that failed America in her hour of need.

But, hold on, don’t expect to hear it for a while yet. I’m guessing you won’t start hearing such rumblings until some time in 2023. For, this is a two bird-killer stone. Only once Trump officially throws his hat into the ring for the presidential race of 2024 will the time be optimal for the ruling faction of the managerial class to turn on their heels and start once again smearing the vaccine – and in the process smearing it all over the legacy of Donald Trump’s presidency. Their plan, then: getting out of the vaccine madness, while saving face, by simultaneously crippling Trump’s presidential run with an informational war barrage on the failure of the vaccines.

You know I’m right, don’t you? *add winking emoji, here*

But here’s the vital takeaway from all this. Less extraordinary is the fact that a ruling class, especially the ventriloquist managerial ruling class, would attempt to narrate their way out of trouble. What is really striking and concerning though is how easily they seem to do it. This unsettling fact points to a serious problem in the deterioration of widespread commitments to common sense and empirically grounded reality.

The idea that you may concede that what I propose may well be possible should concern us all. For it points to how unmoored from a connection to reality so many Americans (and others around the world) have become. We are witnessing, in real-time, the colonization of our shared reality by the psychorium. And, at a critical juncture, hard to precisely predict in advance, the psychorium collapses into pathocracy — and once again hell is unleashed on the world.

What the heck, you ask, is the psychorium? It’s a valuable analytical tool for the study of and resistance to pathocracy. To understand it, watch for my next post to this substack! So, if you haven’t subscribed yet…

1. For anyone interested, I’ve created a video that explores these questions in greater depth, which can be seen here.

2. Trump’s first presidential term was a victory, calling it effective though would be a stretch.

3. These days, I think, one should be upfront about their interest at stake in such an overheated public controversy. First, I am not opposed to the vaccines (if, indeed, it’s technically correct to call them vaccines). I think there are obvious concerns about their long-term safety but would seriously consider them if that choice made sense in my situation. Having recovered from COVID, as confirmed by a serological test, though, and considering that the evidence increasingly shows acquired immunity to be considerably superior to the vaccine, taking on the downside risk makes no sense for me personally. All such questions, though, are of course secondary to the bizarre, draconian enforcement regimes being imposed around the world.

4. Though, one shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that most of the same people who have been catastrophizing COVID since the spring of 2020, in the initial few months (when the information coming out of China suggested it might be far more dangerous than it has turned out to be), brazenly downplayed it and accused Trump of the usual social sins (e.g., racism, xenophobia, authoritarianism) for the containment actions which he did take — however sufficient one thinks they were or were not.

5. A very cursory search of the phrase “Trump Vaccine 2020” came up with a quick list of examples: here, here, here, here, here, and here. If I recall correctly, the first vaccine’s availability was announced five days after the election. Certainly, the first application for emergency authorization came two and half weeks after the election. Curious, that.