Some time ago, I worried out loud on this blog about the possibility of a super potent COVID19 variant I called “the Omega Variant.” The announcement today of the existence of the “Omicron” variant has again got me wondering if my dire predictions might come true.
For it to be what I feared, the Omicron variant would have to be so much worse than the original COVID19 everything would be thrown up in the air in an unprecedented fashion, very, very rapidly. In fact, the very existence of our current concept of the modern world would momentarily be put in doubt. Hundreds of millions of people all over the world would have to die in quick succession.
That’s when we know that the Omicron variant was the Omega Variant.
So far, I don’t even know why the WHO is concerned about Omicron in the first place. As such, I think we’re all kind of freaking out and pouring our fears into it in the abstract.
There is a political aspect to all of this. Enough people die quick enough in the United States and the country will buckle in to warring camps a lot — A LOT — sooner than you might think. But, for the moment at least, that’s all very fantastical.
Soon enough, I think we’ll find out what the deal is with Omicron and how concerned we should be. I’m hold up with a broken right ankle, so, hopefully, if the apocalypse does come, it can at least wait until February.
At least give me a running start, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
There was a point when Jon Stewart was, by proxy, one of the most influential political figures in American politics. But he always seemed very uncomfortable with taken so seriously. It got to the point where whenever he could not help himself and flexed his political clout, he would crack a fart joke to soften the blow.
Joe Rogan / The Internet
And, so, now, we are in a new era, the Joe Rogan Era, where he is in a similar situation to Stewart, only for the Right. The analogy isn’t one to one, but there’s enough similar to take note of it.
Rogan isn’t nearly as smart or engaging as Stewart, but he has garnered a lot of attention in the “alt Right lite” by having clear opinions that he’s will to defend. Up to a point, of course. Wrapping yourself up in an earnest masculinity will only get you so far. Rogan can be a big fucking idiot.
And that tendency to be an idiot has gotten worse as his political influence has increased. In fact, the case could be made that he is yet another cog in the massive, extensive permission structure that allows Traditionalists to make common cause with the MAGA New Right.
He’s part of the amorphous media blob of non-FOX News, non-OANN, non-NewsMax media outlets that water down and make palatable the putrid bullshit of Alex Jones, et. They do this so Traditionalists, who feel pushed up against a political wall because of negative polarization, are looking for any possible excuse not to make common cause with the center-Left in an effort to defeat the rise of fascism in the United States.
Joe Rogan is a pretty big player in all of this. And, you could plot out a counter-factual in which it was Rogan, not Trump, who ran for president in, say, 2020 if Trump had not run in 2016 (or lost.)
Meanwhile, just like Jon Stewart, if Rogan ever does something that causes a lot of pushback, he simply shrugs and says he’s a “comedian not a doctor” and why is everyone getting so upset.
Anyway, Rogan has a lot — a lot — of very passionate defenders who love his gruff, earnest masculine platitudes. No matter what we end up doing — having a civil war or turning into an autocracy, Rogan is likely to only grow in power until things reach some sort of stability again.
What that New Normal will look like is anyone’s guess.
As best I can understand it, here’s the MAGA New Right’s media narrative on COVID19:
COVID19 was intentionally released by either the Chinese government or major pharmaceutical companies — or some combination of both — from a lab in Wuhan as part of a Deep State plot to prevent Trump from being re-elected. Along the way, Dr. Antony Fauci, despite spending his entire adult life trying to save lives, was somehow directly and personally involved in funding this research and directly benefited from it on a financial basis.
Though Trump should get endless amount of praise for his Operation Warp Speed, any form of mandate or mitigation requirement is illegal and should be proactively ignored on a personal basis by God fearing Christians. If necessary, one should take up arms to make your point.Even though there is a free, safe vaccine created by funding and organization by Trump, the average person should not take it, but rather risk getting sick and then taking any number of drugs and potions in an effort to mitigate the symptoms.
Because of the evil machinations of China, the Deep State and pharmaceutical companies, the United States should get reparations from the Chinese government equal to the amount of lost economic production that was caused by the pandemic. What’s more, Dr. Fauci should be arrested and put on trial for mass murder.
And, honestly, in all fairness, Trump should be re-instated because COVID19 was a plot to bring him down, after all. And if that doesn’t work, then Steve K. Bannon is going to work personally to ensure the administration of elections on a local level is so corrupted by his “spiritual shock troops” that it’s impossible for a Democrat to ever win any office ever again.
So, that’s what we’re up against right now with the MAGA New Right. Now, if they can actually back up any of these claims, then I’m willing to listen to them and readjust my thinking accordingly. I’m aware that this is new evidence to suggest that there was some Federal funding of the research going on at the Wuhan lab, but nothing that would indicate that Dr. Fauci was personally getting any monetary gain or that in any way he did anything that would require him being fired, forced to retire or, least of all, arrested.
Steve K. Bannon
But this lack of evidence has not stopped Steve K. Bannon from making it absolutely clear on his podcast that, at a minimum, the Chinese government owes the U.S. Government trillions in reparations, immediately.
All of this bullshit is another side that things are dark in the Untied States and only getting darker. We’re careening towards a breaking point, an existential choice — and none of the three options I think we’re going to be forced to choose from will be all that great.
And, really, the crux of the matter is we’re dealing with macro forces and we’ve gone pass the event horizon. There’s no going back. Something huge is going to happen domestically in the United States no later than around January 2025. It may be as subtle as the country peacefully transitioning into an autocracy. It could be something really dramatic like an epic civil war involving WMD. We might endup with a military junta, but that’s the lease likely of the outcomes I see before us.
I’m beginning to grow suspicious about why, out of the blue, the MAGA New Right pitched a fucking fit over a pretty mundane Late Show song-and-dance routine about getting vaccinate.
I’m not saying there was some sort of conspiracy, but the earnestness of the MAGA New Right people in their belief that it was all humorless “propaganda” is very odd. Colbert — and others — have been making fun of the vaccine hesitant for some time now. Why freak the fuck now….because of that specific gag?
It’s all very odd.
It makes me wonder if it’s something of a setup. They must know that Colbert will make fun of their freak out on his show. (Or, at least will / should.) Maybe they think they can draw attention to how unfair picking on the unvaccinated is or some sort of similar bullshit?
But, no matter what, the difference in views on the gag definitely lays bare the cold hard fact that American civil society is beginning to fray at the edges to an alarming rate. This is another datapoint that suggest we’re going to be faced with a historic, existential choice no later than January 2025.
When negative polarization grows so white hot and absolute that we can’t even agree about what’s funny — we got a problem.
I see our current lingering COVID19 pandemic as a national health crisis and, as such, we need all the help we can get to end it. If that means a late night talk show host does a silly song and dance routine about getting vaccinated, so be it.
But, no, the MAGA New Right hot takes were flying hard and fast tonight about how “unfunny” Colbert was for promoting vaccination. It’s shit like that which really hits home that the bolts are popping off the United States at an alarming rate.
If negative polarization has reached such a white hot level that we can’t even agree on what’s funny because we see everything through the lens of politics, something is deeply wrong.
But there’s one thing we have to understand about this difference in senses of humor — it represents a very serious problem. It makes me remember when I went to the MAGA rally in D.C. after Election Day. At some point, I started to get spooked because people were looking at me funny — I think they knew I was live streaming the event and not exactly giving it a thumbs up with my commentary.
I felt…alarmed. Like, under the wrong conditions I might be physically accosted if I stuck around too long. As such, there are real world consequences to this bullshit.
If we can’t even laugh at the same things, then we really are two nations, one Red, one Blue. Now what.
I got a lot wrong about the COVID19 pandemic when COVID was first reported in Wuhan. The biggest thing I got wrong was how deadly it would be. Given the first reports of how much of a freakout the Chinese government was going through, I assumed we were in for The Stand levels of death ahead of us. I remember going to the grocery story and imagining what it would be like to rummage for food there in some sort of post-apocalyptic, COVID ravaged world.
Things turned out to be bad, but not that bad.
The worst we had was a run on toilet paper, of all things.
I went to the grocery store today and it wasn’t COVID I was worried about, it was a Second American Civil War.
I looked at the bountiful shelves of food and products and wondered if one day — probably at some point after January 2025 — I would walk into the same grocery story and there….just wouldn’t be anything there because the country had imploded into civil war.
This particular dark vision isn’t months away, but years away. And it’s only one of several potential options ahead of us. But for Trump running again, it’s easy to imagine my fears of political violence around January 2025 being way, way overblown.
All things being equal, if Trump isn’t the Republican nominee in 2024, it’s very easy to see us simply slipping peacefully into autocracy. The trains will continue to run on time, if you will.
But Trump definitely seems like he’s going to run again and, as such, the likelihood that he, through sheer idiotic incompetence will push the United States into civil war grows to at least 50 /50, if not more. And, what’s worse, the case could be made that it won’t even be the 2024 presidential cycle that does it, but the 2022 mid-term cycle.
I say this because Steve Bannon et al are aggressively working to corrupt the institutions associated with what we take for granted in the United States — the administration of free and fair elections. It’s at least possible that if it’s widely believed that the 2022 midterms were corrupt that a civil war could break out then, not as part of the 2024-2025 post-election day shenanigans that I fear.
Steve Bannon
And all of this is largely being planned in broad daylight. Bannon is organizing the staffing of election boards across the nation with insane, bonkers Big Lie advocates who might get a little bit too big for their britches in 2022 and push us into a civil war two years earlier than I currently expect.
Because, make no mistake, Bannon and his toadies are recalibrating from the failure of the January 6th Insurrection. It’s possible that they might concluded that if there’s no sexxy TV footage of people going nuts and storming the Capitol, that the talking heads of MSM will lulz things.
This seems dubious to me, but it’s that type of miscalculation that starts wars — civil or otherwise.
But there are too many known unknowns right now. Things could go a lot of different ways. I would suggest you start to think about 2022, and not 2024-2025 being the Fourth Turning, however.
Ok. This is going to take some brain power. But, here goes. When it comes to COVID, I think the MAGA New Right thinks (I use that term loosely) that it was designed in a lab in Wuhan and, as such, we should PRAISE Son Of God Donald Trump for the vaccine, but we shouldn’t take it to own the libs.
And, lib, you never know, it’s possible this is all a “plandemic” in the sense that it was big pharma who was funding the “gain of function” research in Wuhan and you don’t KNOW that Dr. Fauchi isn’t profiting personally from it, now do you? Something something something Jewish space lasers
.
Any change in behavior — however minor — to manage the pandemic is a brutal attack on lady liberty because “my body, my choice” and also you’re excited that Roe is going to be overturned soon.
To take the free vaccine would would somehow be a win to the libs and to Red China, so take Regeneron or horse dewormer instead. There can never be “Vaccine passports” or, God forbid, a vaccine mandate, even though there are a variety of existing vaccine mandates that have been on the books for generations.
The difference is mumble mumble mumble the politics are different mumble mumble and fuck you, lib.
Nothing short of reparation from China will do when it comes to COVID. And, if that doesn’t work, then nuke them and let Trump ride one of the bombs like Slim Pickins in Dr. Strangelove.
And, in the end, it’s all about “personal responsibility” and if the fucking lib still won’t shut up, just tell them “no it won’t” and claim that all the facts that they use are “bogus.”
While I spend a lot of my time pointing to January 2025 as the most likely moment in time that the United States might buckle into a “hot” civil war, there is another January that might be just as bad: that of January 2023.
As I keep saying, America’s political system is so rotten, so fucked up that literally the only thing holding everything together is we’re kind of in an Era of Meh. Biden believes in the norms and principles of a liberal democracy such as ours and no unexpected thunderbolt has put undo pressure on the system.
But — and this is a big but — we have the looming 2022 midterms to worry about.
There are a number of different ways this could play out, but the one that is at the forefront of my mind is the totally bonkers — but totally on-brand — ploy on Trump’s part to get himself third to the presidency by becoming Speaker of the House. He would like this idea because he would be in charge of any impeachment proceedings that took place AND all he would have to do is just show up to be named Speaker.
Now, I know, I KNOW this sounds like my usual “hysterical doom shit,” and given that Trump has proven himself such a fucking idiot that he can’t do even the most basic of autocratic plays, this may be just something that people like me worry about while “normal” people raise their grandkids and think of the next concert they’re going to.
So, it’s very possible I’ll be wrong AGAIN about Trump.
But it is very easy to imagine Trump becoming Speaker, impeaching both Biden and Harris and then inciting violence on the part of the MAGA New Right to such an extent that Senate Democrats feel forced to convict them “for the sake of the nation.”
Then Trump comes back early and we’re right back where we started from in January 2021, with Trump demanding to stay in office forever because of “lost time.”
And, yet, it’s possible that what got us into a civil war in the late 2022 – early 2023 timeframe would not be anything as creative as Trump being named Speaker. It could be that when it become clear that Republicans on a local level will nullify any election they don’t like, then, lulz, all hell will break loose. And we have a civil war not in early 2025, but early 2023.
And, yet, I’m being “hysterical.” Even though everything I see points to our current political limbo being untenable. We’re all going to face an existential choice between now and January 2025.
Compromise Is Weakness This is a very corrosive development that has caused the effective death of American politics, full stop. When you realize that any effort at political comity is a waste of time, then, lulz, what’s the point of talking about politics in the first place. When you realize that any political debate will turn in a screaming match, what’s the point?
Conservatives Have Permission Structure To Be MAGA Even bedrock conservatives who claim to not like the excesses of MAGA vote for MAGA now on a regular basis. They have an extensive permission structure to vote for MAGA — and, soon, Trump without Trump — and so the rise of fascism in the United States is now an immutable law of American political history –we’re fucked.
Systemic Republican Radicalization On a basic, systemic basis, the Republican Party is growing ever-more radical to the point that by 2024 white nationalism and political violence will be seen as a lulz. They will do whatever necessary to take and keep power forever. Prove me wrong, people who think I’m “hysterical” with my “doom shit.” What do I get if I’m right? A prize? Or a bullet in the back of the head from a ICE agent. If you “play by the rules” and are a Good German, you have nothing to worry about. But I’m a loudmouth who will never shut up about what a fucking cocksucker the autocratic of the moment is, so….I might have a little bit more to worry about then the “personal responsibility” rule followers who everyone seems to love?
Negative Polarization is All-Powerful As part of the aforementioned permission structure, negative polarization is so all powerful now that it’s impossible to make common cause with conservatives who claim they aren’t MAGA. What they don’t like is Trump — they love MAGA to the point that they totally embrace the “cruelty is the point” nature of the movement in general. I think this is the main difference between MAGA and the New Right.
Personal Political Interactions Have Broken Down I’ve completely stopped talking about politics with my far more conservative relatives because the risk that either they’re freak out on me or we’ll start screaming at each other is too high. This. Is. Not. Good. This is how the “bad guys” win. You’re just a brief jaunt away from a civil war if your individual, personal politics have locked up that much.
Unfrozen Caveman Governor Ron DeSantis said recently he did not want to hear a “blip” from Biden about his COVID response until Biden addressed the border crisis. (This is whataboutism bullshit, but, lulz.)
Ron DeSantis
But it’s his use of the term “blip” that really bothering me. Why did he use the strange phraseology? Usually, one would say, “I don’t want to hear a word…” about this or that thing.
DeSantis’ team must have workshopped that statement because of this “blip -> flip — > fuck.” So, in essence, DeSantis, with a wink and a nod was saying, “I don’t want to hear a fuck…” in a very round about way.
Anyway, fuck — or blip — DeSantis. What a fucking autocratic piece of shit.
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