The "War on the Center"
And the Center Lost
Above is a debate by the comic Dave Smith, of Libertas fame. It’s an excoriation of the Libertarian Party Chairman in 2019,
, but Sarwark aside, there is a moment—well, a few moments—in the opening by Dave Smith that every time I hear it makes my hair stand up on end. He says:“We need to recognize the moment that we are living in right now, we are, this country is on a god damn suicide mission right now, I am not being hyperbolic, were on a fucking suicide mission right now, $20+ trillion dollars in debt ($36 trillion now), not to mention the unfunded liabilities, the public sector union—you know, pensions that make that look like nothing, a warfare state that can’t find a conflict it doesn’t wanna get bogged down in, an economy that’s regulated every nook and cranny, a prison-industrial complex, and a police state that would make Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin impressed, I know some of you think I’m a little too radical, just tell me when I’m wrong, what am I wrong about in what I just said? You think Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler wouldn’t look at what we have and say, ‘god damn, they gave the Department of Education a SWAT Team, these bastards are good.’ Ok? That is the moment we are living in right now….”
He goes on to explain how Libertarianism has the solution to all of this which I very much identify with. If you’re interested in increasing liberty in the world, I implore you to watch this whole thing and dig into the philosophy of Libertarianism, it’s the philosophy of peace, prosperity, and civilization. But that’s not what has me revisiting it this morning, Dave continues his position:
“You know, something you have to understand about the moment we’re living in right now, and if we don’t grapple with this, we do it at our own cost. There is an insurrection going on against the center, that’s what’s happening in politics right now, it’s been building FOR YEARS! Do you guys know that movie ‘Loose Change’, the documentary about 9/11 that said that 9/11 was an inside job? by the way, I don’t agree with that movie, that’s not the point I’m making, but it was viewed over 100 million times. The idea that the government was responsible for 9/11 was something a lot of people in this country were willing to accept, at least be intrigued by, then Barack Hussein Obama got elected. Barack Hussein Obama ran against Hillary Clinton and John McCain, the two MOST centrist candidates you could imagine, and he won. Then you had the Tea Party movement, the Occupy movement, the Ron Paul campaign of 2008, the Ron Paul campaign of 2012, the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016, and oh yea, Donald Trump’s the president!
“I don’t know if you notice what’s going on, but there is a war on the center! There’s a revulsion against the center and by the way, that’s a good thing! So often we criticize the populist left—the AOC, the populist right—the Steve Bannon, but the message of CNN is basically, I don’t think we need to go as far as AOC, we DEFINITELY don’t wanna go with Bannon! Let’s meet in the middle with Hillary Clinton and Lindsay Graham, THE BLOOD-SOAKED MONSTERS WHO PUT US ON THIS PATH TO NATIONAL SUICIDE!”
So, what landed me here this morning was a line in a recent speech by
, and although I loathe her positions on foreign policy, she is an extremely gifted wordsmith, as long as the word is not “toady.” The debates does with FIRE, who I am a card-carrying member of, always has an excellent introduction by her, and her “the world has gone mad” moment on CNN was maybe the last good moment Brian Stelter had on any medium.She did a speech at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, or ARC Conference titled “Against the Vandals” and in a large part she addressed the “war on the center” starting with the global reconstruction of civilizations by demolition and casualty that was the “moderate” left, through the embrace of the loudest and most destructive:
A few years ago, nearly every millennial in nearly every influential seat in America decided that police departments descended from slave patrols. So we were told we had to abolish the police. We had to abolish prisons.
They said the existence of America was a crime. That we had to do “land acknowledgments” before every meeting and declare our gender in our email signatures. They said that degrowth and socialism were the only way to go and that too many kids would kill the planet. They said that Marx, who none of these people actually bothered reading, must be revered, and that our founders, who m they had no interest in outside of a Broadway show, must be reviled.
There were riots. They tore down statues. What didn’t get renamed got transformed entirely from within.
Eventually, people got tired of this insanity. Normal people—the people who decide elections—have their limits.
But elections in America are only every four years. And in the meantime, this movement destroyed more things than it’s possible to capture in a single speech. It came after our largest companies, our media, our universities, our medical schools, our law schools, our hospitals, our local governments, our elementary schools. Our friendships. Our families. Our language.
They ousted good people for fake thought crimes and tried to ruin their reputations and their lives. Many of those who publicly refused—heroes, each one—are in this room. But others went to ground or left public life, traumatized by the experience of witch burning.
The other thing that it destroyed—at least for the time being—was the Democratic Party. It became unrecognizable. The Democratic candidate for president promised the American Civil Liberties Union in writing that her White House would pay for sex-change surgeries for illegal immigrants in prison for violent crimes. It became utterly detached from reality.
In a line: What happened was that the far left destroyed the center-left in America.
Which is an excellent explanation. I have another line for it:
The center failed to hold.
So, who was this mysterious center and why didn’t they hold. Well, Dave did well to point to John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Lindsay Graham, I’d add to that by saying Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Ron Desantis, most American’s hate these people! The American experiment was never a moderate project. There is nothing more radical than elections in the 1700’s. Now, the last hundred years we’ve just remained in the middle. In a world of exponential growth, the idea that leadership was supposed to remain exactly the same, admin after admin, decade after decade, war after war, is crazy.
After years and years of being subdued by these “moderates” it’s entirely clear that this destruction of the “center” is for all of our benefit.
It was time. The center has been destroying our society for decades, much longer than I’ve been around. If we don’t do something about this now, we might never get another chance. Reading Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72” for the third time, I was struck by a passage. The sting of it felt like a fresh wound, because it was. Hunter is talking with a Democrat campaign manager and has a thought:
“Thats the real issue this time,” he said “Beating Nixon! It’s hard to even guess how much damage those bastards will do if they get in for another four years.”
I nodded. The argument was familiar. I had even made it myself here and there, but I was beginning to sense something very depressing about it. How many more of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame but “regrettably necessary” holding actions? And how many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me, and the, at least 20 million people I tend to agree with, a chance to vote for something? Instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils. I have been through three Presidental elections, now, but it has been twelve years since I could look at a ballot and see a name I wanted to vote for.
In 1964, 1 refused to vote at all, and in ’68 I spent half a morning in the county courthouse getting an absentee ballot so I could vote, out of spite, for Dick Gregory. Now, with another one of these big bogus showdowns looming down on us, I can already pick up the stench of another bummer.
I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing, this year, is beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in I960 —and as far as I can tell, we’ve gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same.
This was in 1972, 52 years later and it’s exactly the same. “The right is Hitler” says the left. “There’s nothing more important than defeating Hitler.”
“So, if you get elected what will you do different than your opponent?”
“Kill more people, with more wars and more poverty. Did I mention that he’s Hitler?”
To be clear Hillary Clinton was always a State Department crony. John McCain literally ran on “staying in Iraq for a hundred years.” Lindsay Graham has called for war with every country short of ourselves. In 1982 Joe Biden shocked the hardline Likudnik Prime Minister Menachem Begin during a closed session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after Begin had invaded Lebanon. All the Senators on the committee were badgering Begin with things like “how could you do this?” and “You're destabilizing the Middle East” and Biden, being the lone Senator to support him, actually shocked Begin by saying, “I would go even further than you. I would be willing to kill women and children.” When Muammar Qaddafi was sodomized on camera by CIA-backed (meaning trained, armed, and funded) “freedom fighters” in Libya her reaction was a devious cackle followed by “we came, we saw, he died!”
The Deep State is the Swamp, The Swamp is the Center
The Deep State is neither far left, nor far right. The deep state is the center. They are who ensures things don’t move any further in either direction. “More of the same” is the name of their game.
They make sure there is enough war to keep Raytheon and General Dynamics happy. Enough fraud to keep Goldman Sachs and Citi Group happy. Enough crooked politicians to keep FISA and the FBI in need. Enough “threats” to the homeland for a busy Department of Homeland Security. Enough disease for a healthy Center for Disease Control.
They make sure we’re afraid enough that we might need an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a U.S. Coast Guard (USCG), and a Border Patrol. What are they protecting!? How much money goes into that, I wonder, for American politicians to bypass the whole thing to bring the people over by caravan and drop them in the middle of New York City??? Put them up in luxury hotels that my whole privileged life being born here couldn't cover a weekend at.
That was just a skim through memory and the USA.gov/agencies site. Let me be clear, the people who work at these agencies are just doing a job. When we talk about “the deep state” we are not talking about them. That’s a common misconception; regular Federal workers are not the deep state. However, a lot of them will have to get a new job if the deep state is ever dismantled. I’m sorry. You're like the secretaries and regular workers for companies passing out “subprime mortgages” to people without jobs leading up to 2008. I know it sucks, but that job wasn’t going anywhere, anyways. Different from 2008 is I can direct you to three jobs off the top of my head right now! Wanna make exhaust systems for Ford? Plastic liners for food service companies? Or repackage Reynolds Wrap? All three hiring now, decent pay, and probably weren’t hiring after the ‘08 housing crash.
The war against the center might just be the first noble war of history! What else? WW2, sure, but the optics were pretty ugly, ask a native of Dresden, Germany how they felt…. Oh yea! You can’t, we killed them all! Hit em so hard that our bombs sucked the oxygen out of the air and turned the pavement into molten lava. The bombs could completely miss you, but the rising temperature or oxygen suck left you blue and lifeless. I know of no other wars which are still considered “noble.”
This is the war they said the “War on Terror” was to be. Who is they? The enablers of the Deep State. It couldn’t exist without them. They are the corporate media, and myth makers themselves. They are the ones who told us “Iraq had weapons of mass destruction”, when it was not so, and “Russian Warships were seen near the Russian-owned Nordstream Pipeline before it blew up” after Joe Biden had announced publicly that “There will be no more Nordstream pipeline if Russian invades Ukraine.” They said, “Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says” although “Intelligence” was not intelligent, they were fraudulent. They told us a “white supremacist” named “Kyle Rittenhouse” had “crossed state lines” with an assault rifle to kill black people at a protest in a town he’d never been to. On the contrary, he lived in Kenosha, was a volunteer firefighter in Kenosha, the gun was registered and bought there, in the same town, he was guarding a local business for an immigrant family, and he shot 3 white people who were known criminal in the act of attempting to kill him. One of them was even a registered sex offender. And the rifle was semi-automatic. They told us we were fools for doing our own research, and that MRNA vaccine for COVID-19 was 100% effective at spreading transmission. They told us Joe Rogan was causing gunshot victims to bleed out in line due to cases of poisoning from his listeners taking “horse paste” that contained the non-toxic Nobel prize winning drug Ivermectin. They said there was hidden Russians subverting our elections with Facebook ads, and our President had been a secret Russian intelligence asset since 1987, and they referred to a comic known for roast comedy as a “speaker at a Trump rally” and that rally as a “Nazi rally” since Nazi’s had also held a rally at the same venue, Madison Square Garden's, in the 1930’s leaving out that so has Janis Joplin, The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, The New York Nicks a lot, Hendrix, The Doors, and this was on the 142nd page of their list of artists who have appeared there. In the same year as the Trump “Nazi” Rally there was J. Cole, Andrea Bocelli, Creed/Three Doors Down, Dave Matthews Band, Duran-Duran, Cyndi Lauper, Billie Eilish, Jelly Roll, Meghan Trainor, Charli XCX, Sabastian Maniscalco, Weezer, Nikki Minaj, Cage the Elephant, Jennifer Lopez, Slipknot, and oh by the way, Tony Hinchcliffe (the “speaker”) himself. A pretty damn diverse Nazi Rally, not to mention all the Israeli flags they were flying! The corporate media is the enforcement arm of the center. The “more of the same” class. The Deep state, in the flesh. Without the corporate media in full persuasive swing, they never would have had the control they’ve held for half a century, and so much evil could’ve been avoided. They need them at the frontlines promoting fear. Control can only come through fear.
, if you don’t know he’s a long-time member and observer of the Corporate Press’ role in reinforcing the center and spreading their fear campaign and does just fabulous explaining how they pull it off in the following video:Make Politics True Crime Again
At a former job I would get in trouble for wearing earbuds while I was working. I had gotten into politics, and I had come up with that between the time that I was at work and back home it was worth all that I learned by listening to news and history podcasts in that eight hours to simply continue doing it and take a chance at having to find another job. I never did, for that anyways, and my current job is much laxer than the old job. One of the times my boss asked me “what is it you are listening to?”
To her I replied, “a podcast about politics.” It was Part of the Problem w/ Dave Smith, and she said, “God, that would put me to sleep!” I remember being so surprised by this, knowing the largest genre of podcasts is quickly becoming True Crime, so someone finds this interesting. I realized that she seen politics as it was being portrayed for decades, dull, aching, noise that doesn’t make anyone’s lives a bit better, but I was seeing this as more of a True Crime story. I came home from school one time and asked my father if he was a Democrat or a Republican and he wasn’t sure. He seen it as a dull paradigm that doesn’t do anything for people at our level. The same way Hunter seen it way back in 1972. Hunter S. Thompson would love the way things are going here in this country. He seen these malignant moderates totally content with “more of the same” as a cancer that needed to be cut out, and maybe if it had been then we wouldn’t have to toss out the baby with the bath water today, but we’re in Stage 3 of malignancy, and these centrist deep state cancers who have refused to do an audit ever for fear of the people finally seeing what’s been happening behind the scenes, must be cut out. Zapped with chemotherapy, to make room for new healthy cells to develop. It’s the only chance that out civilization has.
There’s a war on the center, and the center has lost.
Thank you for reading!
Editor-in-Chief