The New America of Terror and Discontent
Richard Gale and Gary Null PhD
Progressive Radio Network, January 15, 2021
For the vast majority of Americans, the past year has been the most
challenging in their lives – certainly for young adults.  However, not
everyone has been suffering equally. The nation’s health or illness is not
uniform. Much of our suffering is dependent upon the institutionalization
and negligence of previous injustices, the loss of social equanimity,
economic heedlessness, and our leaders’ unmitigated greed and pursuit of
power.  Nor is everyone adversely affected by the shifts underway in the
imaginations of the political and ideological universes. The transnational
class of corporate and banking elites, for example, has little motivation to
respect or contribute to national boundaries and interests. They perceive
themselves as global actors.  For the generals and captains of neoliberal
globalization, the puppet masters of financial markets, the Covid-19
pandemic only caused annoying disruptions in the quality of their lives.
For the remainder, it has been cataclysmic.

There is something on the horizon that does not bode well for most
Americans.  It is a simple principle to understand; yet so subtle it will likely
go unnoticed until everyone is individually and collectively affected. It is
the utter lack of balance within the nation’s body politick, and across the
media that spoon feeds us virtual images of a faux theatrical play, the
illusory icons on our minds’ monitor screens, that shape our perceptions of
reality.  This is how control is exerted over our thoughts, speech and
actions. In fact, it is only after people exercise their thoughts
independently, with the certain belief that they have actual self-control
over their lives, that they arrive at the realization that their perceptions
may be largely distorted.

Throughout America’s history there has been a system of three federal
branches to assure there is a platform for checks and balances as well as a
structure to contain the tensions between them.  That system now is being
rapidly challenged and even eroded. Now the middle of the road
Democrats officially control the White House and both legislative bodies.
We will see what awaits us.
There is also what is commonly referred to as the “fourth estate,” the
powers of the press and news media that control the framing of the
political narrative and partisan issues. In the past, the media was expected
to hold the government accountable by exposing its conflicts of interest
that endanger the public, its misdemeanors, and systemic corruption.  This
too is in decay as the media has been fully captured by corporate interests
and now aligns itself politically and ideologically with the new political
elite determined to reshape democracy and launch a new reset that will
dramatically infringe on individual rights and liberties.

Finally, there is the growing influence of a fourth branch of government,
the corporatocracy and its private interests.  We might also include the US
intelligence community that now increasingly operates independently
from executive and legislative oversight.

Together we can witness this cabal of seemingly independent entities,
working simultaneously in consortium and in opposition to each other,
propelling us towards a future tsunami of greater polarization and
immense social disruption.

Earlier generations were not threatened by the telecommunication and
technological giants, such as Google, Facebook and Amazon. Clinton’s
Communications Decency Act of 1996, despite its intentions to protect free
speech, was otherwise destructively naïve. At that time it was sensible;
however, that was before the advent of the social media that now
dominates our lives and shapes our political discourse. Now we are
witnessing Silicon Valley as a force far more powerful than the lobbyists on
K Street to ensure that corporate Democrats are raised to a position of
absolute power.  Yet the problem would be equally threatening if it were
the corporate and radicalized GOP in power.

The centrist Democratic left, lulled in a passivity that “it can’t happen
here,” is every bit as dangerous and delusional as the Republican far-
right’s paranoia over conspiracies squatting behind every nook and
cranny.  A moderate centrist right no longer exists as it has now exited
reality like a herd of lemmings to follow Trump over a phantasmagoric
cliff.

The more important question to contemplate is how this will impact
yourself and average citizens.  What happens elsewhere around the world

must no longer be viewed in isolation.  Globalization is perhaps the most
holistic phenomena within the matrix of financial capital movements and
post-modern social restructuring. China now has the means to socially
control most of its population, especially in urban areas. On the other hand,
China would be unable to succeed in this endeavor without the direct
assistance, trade and technological development of Silicon Valley and the
private innovators of intelligence and surveillance applied science.  China
has already launched social scoring, a nefarious means to reward and
penalize public activity. If a person protests the lack of personal freedom,
democratic values or free speech, his or her social score decreases. And
through digital networks, authorities can monitor and identify every
Chinese citizen’s movements. All of this technology is ready for launch in
the US and other developed nations. However, rather than social scoring, it
is called block chain, the digital database that gathers any information it is
programmed for. Block chain has already been employed for almost a
decade.

After the recent attack on the capitol by hundreds of Trump’s most radical
supporters, a Patriot Act 2.0 was ready to be launched. This follows a
similar playbook to the weeks following 911, and Biden was one of its
principal legislators. Does this mean that the capitol was a false flag as
many conspiratorial sites, right and left, are now suggesting?  Not
necessarily.  We believe this apparent convergence of events may have
more in common with what the quantum physicist and Nobel laureate
Wolfgang Pauli and his colleague Carl Jung,theorized as synchronicity, or
“meaningful coincidences” that unfold despite there being no apparent
causal relationship.  Perhaps this is a wrong interpretation, but it is
nevertheless something worth considering as we try to better understand
how a dystopian future is evolving before our eyes through what might
appear as a convergence of disparate events, laws and policies.

At this moment the federal government and individual states are over-
reacting to Covid’s health threats, the climate and environment, and the
collapse of social cohesion.  These threats are eliciting government
mandates, such as vaccination. Anthony Fauci has suggested that Covid-19
vaccine mandates are on the table at the federal level, which would
overrule state laws.  The fact that this is being publicly stated should quell
many conspiratorial theories. It is already part of the long-term agenda for
expanding the government’s social control under the pretense and

propaganda of keeping Americans safe under the banner of national
security.

New laws are under construction that would redefine hate speech.
Censorship of free speech for criticizing official narratives and policies to
tackle the pandemic are being enforced. Any criticism towards the
complete failure of the PCR tests as a reliable diagnostic tool is being
redefined as threats to public health.  People raising such critiques may
eventually find their names on domestic terrorist lists.  And this scenario is
not beyond the imagination.  Wikileaks revealed that environmental,
animal protection, and human rights groups have been labeled as domestic
terrorist organizations.  Guilt by association laws, for example buried in
Obama’s National Defense Authorization Act, are in place. Expanding a
law’s scope is far easier than erasing it from the books. Consequently, it is
not unlikely that these laws may eventually widen to include charges of
subversion based solely on the emails you read, the videos you watch or
the broadcasts you listen to.  This would inevitably lead to the death toll
for any residue of integrity in journalism.  This is underway as we witness
Silicon Valley’s collusion with the government to cancel the voices of some
of our best investigative journalists such as Chris Hedges, Sharyl
Attkinsson, Glenn Greenwald, Max Blumenthal and Julian Assange in
particular.  These are only a few of many examples. The new unstated law
is that original investigation must support the official narrative, otherwise
it will be prohibited from accessible public view.

We may recall that under the second Bush administration, the justice
department created “free speech zones,” fenced off or confined areas
where demonstrators were only permitted to exercise their Constitutional
rights of free speech.  Today we are only several small amendments away
before the right to assemble being banned altogether.

Now faced with growing condemnation by many nations, the US’
hegemony on the world geopolitical arena has waned considerably.
Biden’s administration and its return to neocon foreign and neoliberal
market policies will likely make every effort to regain the dominance it lost
during the past four years.  How successful a Biden White House will be to
recover lost ground and international respect remains to be seen. On the
other hand, what has vanished in the US’ former full spectrum dominance
over the geopolitical landscape is now being inverted to strengthen federal
hegemonic reign over the American population.
Finally, we need to awaken to modern technologies’ remarkable
sophistication and its certain threats to the health of our societies, and
even to our definition of being human. Sadly, this is an industry each one of
us has been complicit in advancing. Coining a term by one of the planet’s
most important and forgotten 20 th  century prophetic voices, the Trappist
monk Father Thomas Merton, we are facing a great Unspeakable, a
spiritual crisis contributing to the existential vacuity of modern American
culture.  Few are aware that in his 1964 collection of meditations, Seeds of
Destruction, Merton predicted that the civil rights movement would
confront a catastrophic impasse and may find itself without
leadership.  Four years later, Martin Luther King Jr, who Merton had a deep
correspondence with, was assassinated.  Merton would die suddenly later
that year under very mysterious circumstances on his return to the US
from Thailand.

Another way to describe the Unspeakable is criminal Sovereignty, with a
capital S, to convey its numinous qualities. If alive today, Merton would
look upon the Proud Boys on the right, and Antifa on the left, as mere
expressions of the meaninglessness of American life manifesting as a
turbulent ocean of afflictive emotions and thoughts. Instead of technology
serving the needs of humanity, Americans are being increasingly
conditioned to willingly bow as slaves to technology.  The Unspeakable’s
unspoken mantra is:  technology must progress regardless of how many
people fall destitute, jobless, debt ridden and physically ill with only
suicide as a recourse to escape.  “American democracy today,” Merton
observed over 55 years ago, “is just cheap pressed wood fiber, cardboard
and spray paint.” Consequently, the elite sitting in the global control tower
view the emerging technological regime as preferable to democracy’s
kabuki theater.  Advanced surveillance, artificial intelligence, intelligent
robotics, transhumanism, a 5G internet of everything, genetic engineering,
and weather modification should be our guiding avatars. The solutions, he
would argue, can no longer be found in civil discourse or the rights of
human beings gathering in assembly. For the ruling elite, the masses are
dumb sheep in need of a shepherd. This is what author Ronald Wright
called the “progress trap” – progress’ unending efforts to feed technology’s
hunger to devour natural and human capital, interest free. And the
mainstream press and news media, in its’ malady of cognitive dissonance,
serves as its unreflective cheerleader for our march towards civilizational
collapse.
Merton was keenly aware of technology’s dangers to social stability. In a
1967 letter he took aim at the “universal myth that technology infallibly
makes everything in every way better for everybody. It does not.”
However, he was by no means a Luddite. “Technology could indeed make a
better world for millions of human beings,” he wrote. Yet there remained
the nightmare of technology transforming the world into a “more
collectivist, cybernated mass culture.” Decades before the first desktop,
Merton foresaw a complete fragmentation of the nation’s moral and
spiritual fabric when people will begin basing all of their political and
ethical decisions on computers.  Prophetically he wrote to a friend, “just
wait until they start philosophizing with computers!” That was 1967.  He
even foresaw technology becoming a means to elevate the slaves of
technology’s false self, to satisfy narcissistic appetites for admiration and
status. In other words, the social media of wokeness.

“The greatest need of our time,” Merton wrote in his Conjectures of a Guilty
Bystander, “is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional
rubbish that clutters our minds and makes all political and social life a
mass illness. Without this housecleaning we cannot begin to see. Unless
we see we cannot think. The purification must begin with the mass media.”

For this reason we urgently need to penetrate the illusions of propaganda
and popular falsehoods, across the entire political spectrum as well the
self-appointed pontificating Pharisees, that we have entered a new social
era. Despite its newness, it has also been clearly predictable.  No doubt, if
Orwell were penning his great novel today, the emergence of this new
American era we are witnessing would not be fiction.