So, let’s talk conspiracy theories…
Largely what we’re facing is not a conspiracy, but a prospiracy. Yes, there are conspiracies within it, before you start screaming. We all know about journolist. That one was easy. Look, it’s a highly incestuous field, where people can only get jobs by toeing the political line. Trust me on this, I have friends who are journalists. Any hint of being on the right, and you’re doing the weekly articles with the shopper ads in Podunka Kentucky. Or you do your thing for tips on substack. It is of its kind as controlled a field as traditional publishing. More really. So, yeah, the fact that already fully controlled assets conspire to make their reporting more uniform is not surprising. (And if you think there isn’t still an active list, you’d be naive.) That they were caught at it is the only surprising thing.
Mostly though it’s a prospiracy: people thoroughly indoctrinated in “the proper response and what signals to watch for” all do the same thing, because they’re all trying to stay in and signal louder. Or strike a blow against the other side. the end result is…. well. What we have.
But it is not an actual conspiracy. A conspiracy would be both more dangerous and less.
What do I mean that? Exactly that. If they were a coordinated conspiracy, their responses would make more sense and be less insane. (Take this. They’re just throwing things at the wall.) Yes, they talk about five year plans and how it’s all coming true, but seriously? They always have five year (ten year, twenty year) plans. They’ve never worked, ever.
No, we’re not living through the end of a USSR plan. None of the USSR plans ever worked, and this is no exception. But the USSR was always good at rewriting whatever happened as “we meant to do that” and it’s entirely possible the person talking about how this is all a plan actually believed it. (To think it fits you also need a highly — highly — skewed view of events. You need to cherry pick a lot.)
They would be less dangerous if it were an actual conspiracy because leftist conspiracies have never worked, ever. They tend to think the intention is the thing and ignore that individuals have agency, and it kind of destroys all their beautiful shiny plans.
Most of the things that we think are conspiracies really aren’t. They’re just people being people over structures that aren’t designed for much of anything.
Look, the Great War. The left has this theory, or did in the sixties, that old men send young men to die in war, so they can shape the future without the disruptive youth.
It’s neat, clear and false. Wars happen because nations want resources or powerful men wnt more power. Or yes. Young men are the ones who fight, because they always are. The powerful men don’t want young men to die. They want their young men to win. And be loyal to them forever for the great Victory.
That young men die in great numbers comes from the fact that no centralized authority is very good at it in any way.
In the same way, take the cold war. We kept the USSR going for probably a good sixty years extra, with all our aid, our help, and our — frankly — kowtowing to them.
Was this some grand conspiracy because we wanted to stay at war? Not hardly. Because it was some great profiteering? Sure there was some of that.
BUT MOSTLY? It was the knowledge problem.
Heinlein said, and he wasn’t whistling Dixie that our intelligence services have always sucked. He was not wrong. Well, I don’t know ALWAYS. But they’ve sucked my entire life.
And part of the reason for this is that we’re a very large country and the three letters themselves are huge, complicated and contradictory.
Worse, they’ll all part of the mind set that we’ve had inculcated into us. So you know, the three letter agencies in the mid twentieth knew central planning was more efficient. So they bought into the USSR’s claims of great production, etc.
It’s important — very — to recognize that in a centralized, top down system errors get passed along and magnified. Hence, if someone overestimated the USSR, everyone else worked around that. No one dared question it, because what if they were right?
That’s what we’re prisoners of. Not some grand conspiracy, but prospiracy and the flaws inherent in the system.
The good news is the distributed information system we call the internet and we call various electronic means of communication is breaking that.
When you feel like everything is falling apart, it’s because it is. And it’s not because the enemy is so powerful, but because they’re losing control, don’t understand what’s happening, don’t know how things are going to change, and are losing their minds.
It’s not some grand plan. It’s the little plans blowing up. It’s the beliefs we all were taught falling apart.
The future is terrifying. And the blow up of all our corrupted information and all our corrupted structures is going to hurt badly.
But this is not anyone’s plan, and certainly not the enemy’s. The left hasn’t been hoodwinking us for decades. They’ve been careening through information errors and trying to cover their asses.
It’s just they controlled the media and that covered for them.
But we? We’re distributed. We’re chaotic.
And the future is unscripted. But we have an advantage.
Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark, and stay frosty.
We got this.
