Stand By While We Reboot the Narrative
Blue-Anon Heats Up the Mimesis as the Calm After the Storm is Pregnant With Suspicion
Everything is calm. Too calm. Way too calm out there.
Ignoring South Korea, France, Syria, Ukraine, Russia, Iran, Romania, etc. of course…
But beyond these and a thousand other places of disorder and chaos, November 2024 legitimately fits the profile of “mostly peaceful,” as many noticed even in the immediate aftermath of the election:
Regardless of how you think about it, it’s very odd. The Left took the election quite well. Observing the general lack of violent disorder I almost began to admire their civic virtue, prudence, self-control, etc. when I had been expecting a repeat of earlier habits—and worse.
But then I consider screaming spokesman like this, maybe I’m not so sure:
And I get the same feeling when observing the antics of any of the fine folks on the new liberal hangout known as BlueSky who seem to be trying to rile each other up for something:
But the big surprise, after the other big surprise—Trump winning decisively—is still that the left isn’t out rioting in the streets en-masse like they did after Trump won in 2016, as well as their repeat performance in the 2020 “Summer of Love and (Mostly) Peace.”
Perhaps the lack of an ambiguous, extremely close election result is the reason for the mostly peaceful character of the last month. There’s no easy moral justification obvious to everyone for mass demonstrations, no plausible case that a recount would immediately change the outcome ala the 2000 election in Florida. There’s also no simple three-word slogan or narrative out there yet that can motivate crowds to burn, loot, and kill in the name of stopping Trump. Well, they do have one to try, “tRUmp iS hITler,” but frankly, it’s been overused and thereby too weakened to motivate people on its own. Perhaps “Trump is Hitler, AND STALIN, AND MUSSOLINI.” Well, that’s already too long for simple chanting purposes, and it’s a line that they also already tried in the lead-up to the election.
Conservative writer Charles Haywood thinks the seeming silence is due to deep cover shenanigans plotting going on right now for a full-on military coup attempt led by someone like General Mark Milley. And there were some rumblings in that direction a few days after the election:
We’ll see. From the perspective of the “deep state”, perhaps they’ll reach a point where launching a literal “tanks in the street” coup is logistically simpler than indirectly manipulating angry leftists as shock troops. Just issue orders to the military instead. No nationally acceptable narrative is needed. You just need a line good enough to persuade a few duty-bound soldiers in an already thoroughly ideologically purged military.
And perhaps they will. But for now, after several weeks of stupor and silence from the left, all that is visibly left of the the anti-Trump resistance is isolated grumbling and words about Trump’s cabinet picks. But nothing major. Which makes one wonder: What sort of a deep state is this? And what are they planning and how do they make their plans if it is taking them so indeterminably long to respond coherently to Trump?
While some areas within American politics have shown evidence of fully conspiratorial institutions and control, as most evidently with the C.I.A. over its entire history, there is no architectonic and truly unified deep-state, as the EXIT Newsletter masterfully covered a few weeks before the election. The deep state is not a single unified hierarchy, but a collection of dispersed and yet ideologically aligned organizations and individuals who produce the outward appearances of cooperation because they have aligned interests and aligned enemies.
In this view, the deep state, alike a fungus, has no clearly defined human leader or head,1 no strict timetable, and no perfectly well-thought-out plan. Its individual members may have these, and those who are best at motivating others sway and motivate others to their own goals and ends. But the totality is best described more like a cult in a state of mimetic frenzy or a purity spiral. A motivating vice, or vices, begins the process, but no individual or individual organization has full control , even as extremely aligned behavior often results between disparate groups. In this, we can easily understand the inter-elite competition and factions within the deep state that we’ve begun to see over the past year not as a confusing paradox, but as evidence for the movement’s true nature, not a single unified axis of evil, but a fragile one, aligned but for moments of aligned self-interest. This both makes the problem of fighting the deep state easier somewhat, even if it also means that truly defeating it is more difficult than merely stopping George Soros or Klaus Schwab, as it can “sprout” new leadership whenever any individual is defeated.
In this, the plans and actions of the deep state, “globalhomo”,2 the “uniparty”, the bankers and their mercenaries, or whatever words we are using to describe the enemy are just a special case of the pathways of human behavior in general. Desires and goals spread more efficiently amidst a class of already pre-aligned participants than they do amidst the general population according to normal human mimetic desire. In the case of the, well, I am going to continue to call it the deep state, there is a particular strong internal process of mimetic evolution, a process of natural selection of ideas, desires and goals amidst the members. Someone who comes up with a workable tactic, message, or strategy towards one of the general desires of the group will draw others to imitate the same—and the others to take the idea one step further themselves. The first to try a new tactic, putting up a so-called trial balloon, or testing the waters, sees whether the idea or tactic gets mimetic traction. If others like it, they spread it, and it takes off. If not, everyone works to come up with a new idea. This process, and its results, are quite powerful, often surprisingly so.
We need not invoke, even if in some cases it sometimes may exist,3 direct master planning of political narratives. Individuals can come up with radically similar behaviors, narratives, and even phrasing merely from this mimetic evolution:
Concerning the anti-Trump resistance, understanding that there is no singular anti-Trump central committee controlling everything explains why there has not yet been a consistent and coherent anti-Trump narrative and movement. The anti-Trump resistance has always been mimetic. But understanding this, can perhaps give us some clues for understand whatever the new resistance, once assembled, will look like. I believe we can use past history to piece together some of the threads being placed to build a new one.
Now the source ideas for such mimetic evolution in determining what narrative line to pursue and promote is not limited to things thought up by uniparty(ers) or “deep statists.” The original sources for your mimesis often come from things your enemy has said or done. For warfare too is mimetic. You become what you fight. You become somewhat of what you oppose in reacting to it, and your opponent takes on something of you.4 And this is the case because your enemy, in being unlike you, has new and fresh, or at least fresher ideas, ideas that you have perhaps seen work when used upon you, and therefore ideas, desires, and tactics that seem like even better ideas for you to take up, modified, of course, and use for your own side.
Let’s look at the “resistance” narratives to the last several elections to see this process of mimetic evolution in action. In each case below, I am neither necessarily affirming nor denying that the opposition narratives are valid, but just showing the pattern of what has been claimed:
2000: Democrats — Electoral Fraud5
2004 Democrats — Electronic Assisted Electoral Fraud + Voter Suppression
2008: Republicans — Foreign Interference (Obama not born in the U.S.) + Electoral Fraud + Voter Fraud
2012: No major protest narrative6
2016: Democrats — Russian Collusion Voter (or at least Psy-War) Fraud
2020: Republicans — Voter Fraud + Electoral Fraud + Oligarch Influence (Soros + Zuckerburg) + Chinese Collusion
2024 Democrats — Muskist Israeli Russian Collusion Electoral Fraud From Space!
2028? — Super heavy-duty Oligarch Russian-Chinese-Iranian-Israeli Electoral Collusion Fraud by Literal Aliens From Space!
Now, none of these protest narratives succeeded in overturning the results of an election, but provided plausible deniability, that is, justification to those invoking them, for opposition to the ruling regime. While the hope is to persuade everyone, such narratives are firstly for internal party consumption, to motivate members of one’s own party to justify to themselves their own opposition.
However, what I find most interesting to notice, demonstrating that the narrative process is organic and mimetic, is that the protest movement to each election draws upon a variation of prior protest narratives. And it does so while the onus of “protest” itself flips back and forth between the parties. Democrats in 2000 decry electoral fraud in Florida and then tack on a few more details in their ultimately less potent 2004 narrative. Republicans made some similar claims of electoral and voter fraud in 2008 with little success except internally. In 2016, foreign boogeymen became the narrative innovation with the “Russiagate” narrative added by Democrats to the basic “fraud” argument, while Republicans followed this step in 2020 by connecting China to electoral fraud while amping up the general allegations in a big way.
And again, I am not necessarily claiming that these arguments are all false, or all true. It is likely that there is some truth to all of these narratives. If they had no plausibility, even to the people spreading them, they wouldn’t catch on. But plausibility by itself does not seem to be enough. The narratives have gotten more complicated, and like the narrative escalations in movie sequels, have become more and more grand and overpowered over time. This seems to show that the “wow” factor, or a claim of ever more spectacular chicanery is the other key element in ensuring the spread of protest narratives. But such escalation, just as with movies or with comic book superheroes and their villains, has its limits, as we will soon see with the 2024 protest narrative.
Of course, you may have noticed that my suggested 2024 protest narrative hasn’t happened.
I say—not yet. But it’s being tested.
The reboot, expansion pack, augmented, made for 2024 mixtape “Muskist Israeli Russian Collusion Electoral Fraud From Space!” actually is out there as Newsweek reported a week after the election: Left-Wing 'Starlink' Election Conspiracy Theory Spreads Online
The basic argument is that Elon Musk used his Starlink satellite system to access voting machines around the country and add fake votes through voter information garnered from his pre-election America PAC petition and thereby stole the election for Trump. Oh, and Musk did so under the pay of Russia and Israel because he and Trump are agents of Vladimir Putin and Mossad, Musk having bought rockets from Russia twenty years ago being the ultimate proof of this collusion.
I admit, it’s a cool-sounding narrative, as this leftist tries (quite hilariously) to argue for it:
As this image post on X a day after the election attempted to summarize, for example, there are many other aspects to their grand narrative, but they all sum up to election fraud having expanded to space with Elon Musk’s and Russia’s help:
Conservatives on X are also rightfully mocking the fullest extension of this narrative, leftists claiming that Kamala Harris is secretly in charge, and really won the election, as Blue-Anon, a leftist-Democrat mimesis of the last decade’s right-wing Q-Anon.
And if this Reddit post is to be believed and isn’t a parody, there is further demonstration of this mimetic evolution process, as leftists argue about new slogans, and how to modify and improve upon, or at least stake out a small difference from, old rightist/Republican ones:
But while this narrative is out there, it’s been a month since the election, and it has yet to take off like the Democrat and Republican narratives in 2016 and 2020 did.
The depth of the Republican victory this year again probably explains this, as Trump’s margin this year in the requisite swing states, where about 230,000 additional Harris votes would have been required for her in certain states to win the electoral college as compared to a Biden win of only around 43,000 votes in the swing states over what would have been required for a 2020 Trump victory, and of a similar margin for Trump over Clinton in 2016 of around 77,000 votes. In the states that mattered for victory, regardless of the overall popular vote, 2024 wasn’t close, and it’s far harder to craft a narrative that 230,000 votes were changed, manipulated, or fraudulent than it is for 43,000 or 77,000, let alone 2000’s deciding 537 votes for Bush in Florida.
The protest narratives will have to evolve further before one manages to spread. We’re already seeing this to some degree with indirect attacks on Trump by way of his nominees being the seeming priority, and Obama testing out other vague trial balloons:
While following the mimetic process, taking Republican claims and then inversely adapting them as one’s own, Obama’s generic critiques, I’d bet, will need additional evolution before they become “The Narrative.”
His claims are bland and general enough, and perhaps if you squint, semi-justified enough to be plausible. They are more plausible than other arguments, cool as those others may sound. But Obama’s claims just ring flat and boring, and don’t sound as terrifyingly cool, catchy, and incisive as “Muskist Israeli Russian Collusion Electoral Fraud From Space!”
And so, the experimentation continues until a variation is found that is both plausible enough, and exciting enough to get the shock troops moving again. The task is again made extra difficult by the fact that there’s little runway left for further escalation. Once you start blaming multiple foreign countries for your election loss and say that you were cheated by people working from space, how much bigger than that can you get? What do you do to create a new an exciting narrative when you’ve already used up just about everything else? How do you outdo past claims that Trump is literally Hitler and stole the election? Perhaps claiming that real aliens from space stole the election? Perhaps saying that Trump is literally a cloned or reincarnated Hitler? You see, it’s difficult to come up with something plausible and also exciting enough, when even these types of claims—already feel like they’ve been used—and overused—and to no effect.
Perhaps something different will be tried like this week’s mantra that “CEOs need to die,” for a more traditionally Marxist protest effort.
The trial balloons keep flying—and then falling.
And yet they will keep trying.
Because you need a narrative to justify to your own, and especially to yourself what you stand for and why you stand against what you stand against.
And you can’t just have your own personal narrative, postmodern as we, and they, all are. You have to have one that works for others, that unifies you and your allies, that is, in fact, the activating and actualizing principle of your movement. And this is not just for protests and opposition, but in fact for all political action. The mimetic battle of ideas, which, as James Poulous argues, is ultimately a spiritual war, is prior to physical and political conflict. For all actions occur on the basis of ideas, goals, hopes, and desires. Every grand set of actions needs a motivating and actualizing principle, a spirit in fact.7
But for now, the uniparty, the swamp, the left, globalhomo, the deep state, all of them, seem to have no such thing to unify around and motivate themselves.8 And that’s why for the moment, we see such confusion, such despair, such calm, such dejection and melancholy from them all.
Their message for now is only: stand by while we reboot the narrative one more time.
For now, that’s also all that about all that we can do about what they might do. Stand by and watch to see what they come up with. And in the meantime, watch the fireworks around the world.
And I guess watch out carefully for the narrative-less “solution” to the deep state’s problems. If they can’t produce an effective “Blue-Anon” resistance motivated by a powerful narrative, they still have six more weeks to wreak more chaos around the world and maybe even launch a real domestic coup, as crazy as that may sound.
Perhaps they won’t have much until 2028, and will try to build “their own Trump” just as they currently discuss building their “own Joe Rogan.”9 I think this is a strong possibility, that they will turn to co-opting the leftward half of Trumpism to their own devious ends, changing strategies and marketing, and even some of their goals, but at least regaining the relevancy, energy, and cultural clout that they shockingly seem to have lost this election cycle.
Remain suspicious.
But remember that evil protest narratives spread by the deep state, globalhomo and their minions are not the only things that spread mimetically. In fact, and in the best possible sense, this was the most mimetic narrative ever:
And still is…
As seems to be the best way to summarize them. “Globalhomo” is the ideology and religion that motivates the U.S. (and other Western countries) political establishment. I borrow the term from Charles Haywood, but it may have originated elsewhere.
This meme portrays it well:
This post is a great summary of how cabals and secret societies work: https://x.com/Aristos_Revenge/status/1864010809145164254
The arguments it makes, however, are not, I believe, mutually exclusive with something supernatural—and evil, influencing and motivating the members of such groups.
World War I made the Allies more like the worst of the Germans and the Germans more like the worst of the Tsarist Russian Empire.
Vietnam War: It needs no saying: everyone was stooping to the same level of brutal warfare by the end.
The American Revolution was launched over taxes but say hello to new higher taxes in the newly independent USA just 15 years later.
America fights the Cold War against the evil USSR police state… Well, well, well, now the U.S.A. has its own secret police, MK-Ultra program, and lots more evilness copied from the Bolshevik playbook.
Warfare is mimetic. All conflict is mimetic. You become somewhat of what you oppose in reacting to it, and your opponent takes on something of you. Usually, mimesis is a contagion that most definitely does not pass along the best parts of either side.
Electoral fraud = cheating in the vote counting
Voter fraud = cheating on the voter side (double voting, or ineligible voters voting)
This was the moment of Peak Uniparty dominance against the two anti-establishment protest narratives, the Teaparty Movement and Occupy Wall Street.
An aside, but is there really much difference between calling in “an idea”, “a principle”, or “a spirit.” Perhaps this mimetic process isn’t merely organic experimentation, but often involves an evil spirit motivating the group, as with Hitler’s NSDAP and Leninst Communism, etc. Here, the evil spirit(s) and the ideas of the group are literally the same thing. And this isn’t really a wild claim or a new idea. It’s how we used to—pre-Reformation and pre-modernity—naturally view the relationship between individuals, societies, and ideas. Bad ideas could spread like a “contagion” and “infect” individuals, “possessing” them and then ultimately taking over the entire society like a plague. In this case, a “demon” or “spirit”, “an idea”, and “a principle” are kind of the same thing, and not really all that different or separable.
Some sources in favor of this view:
and
and also Charles Taylor’s massive, yet amazing A Secular Age.
And in literary form, Fyodyr Dostoevsky’s prophetic Demons as well as Crime and Punishment to a degree.
More on this idea in a forthcoming article.
Perhaps we could say that the demons they worship as gods that are the root, or the instantiation of their vices and ideas are fighting amidst themselves, “satan driving out satan...”
Interestingly, and justifying to me that this will happen, I’ve noticed that approximately every 25 years there's been a major mimetic convergence in the general structure of American politics:
1940s - Democrats coopt the Republicans, become an anti-Communist pro-military party
1960s - Republicans coopt the Democrats, become corporatist Trotskyite (aka neo-Conservative) party
1990s - Democrats coopt the Republicans, become a corporate party
2010s - Republicans coopt the Democrats, become a worker's party (MAGA)
2030s or 2040s? - Democrats coopt the Republicans, become a second MAGA party?
Interesting musings about the Deep State. Obviously ideology and worldview is important, but I think it hides the REAL enemy, which is bureaucratization. All of those organizations and actor and causes seem coordinated because their organizational and financial incentives are in alignment, not just their ideologies. The dream is a society with a top-heavy administrative structure, managing and regulating and ministering to a thousand different parts of society. The Blob will define problems as broadly and fuzzily as possible, and then make a systemic effort to never solve them and use the distress and concern as fuel for its survival and expansion.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/leviathan
In 2020 there was the republican assertion that the Obamas used Italian military satellites to rig the election without going through channels that the nsa could monitor somehow.