Come together

Bessent-Lutnick have made 47's "strategy" clear: force compellence through isolation. Respond by eliminating isolation.

The imperialists insist on one proposition above all: they have a monopoly on truth — “alternative facts” are official history, the Gulf is American, democracy is incompatible with freedom, civil rights laws protect “competent white men” alone, the economy is whatever they say it is (and not what they say it isn’t), we’ve always been at war with Eastasia — and adherence to this truth will be compelled. MAGA is religious: its tenets are objects of faith with no evidentiary basis, and the price of membership is one’s credulity. You should be thanking them.

Thus the biggest government intervention into the economy in more than a century is “liberatory”, thus the invention of damn statistics to lie about trading relationships, thus semantic pedantry regarding VATs and reciprocity. 2+2=5, science is subserviant to Bronze Age mysticism, flood the zone with shit.

These are not mistakes, this is not incompetence, it is truth theft (in addition to other forms of theft). If “stupidity [i]s as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain” then hail to the thief, baby.

Yes, this is fucking stupid! Totalitarianism always is. But it is not the type of stupidity that sets out to find the truth and misses, it is not the type of stupidity that can be corrected. It is the type of stupidity that rejects the truth intentionally, an attempt to create a new reality through brute force.

For this to succeed the old truths must be subjugated, repressed, violently denounced. That is the purpose: ritualistic humiliation of the priests of the old order (lawyers, academics, commanding heights of industry), euthanasia of the prior elite (because they can attest to the truth). The expression of power for the purposes of cultural revolution with all that entails, including blood. Especially blood.

Bessent threatened other nations who might consider self-defense against imperialism, because we wouldn’t want escalation now would we (look what you made me do said every truth-thief). This is a protection racket, and protection rackets work through isolating their victims and making them feel powerless. Similarly, Lutnick says resistance is futile and capitulation is the only rational response. Nevermind the wrongness of the claim — the only rational response is coordinated opposition to the theocratic imperialists — the very demand is an insult to the truth in deference to personalist, global, totalitarianism. There is no other logical stopping point.

So “coordinated defiance” is the pathway forward. The world is not powerless. The US seeks to divide and conquer, the world must respond with unity. The US seeks coercion so the world must destroy the ability of the United States to coerce them, even if the short-run costs of doing so are great. As always, Havel is our guide: we are presently compelled to live within a lie, but we do not have to accept it. We cannot accept it. Doing so is self-abnegation.

More ideas on how to achieve this in future posts, which I will tease by saying that much of the needed infrastructure — on both micro and macro scales — is already in place. In the meantime, catch up on Quiggin’s series “How to dispense with the United States” [1, 2, 3] and live as if you were free. That is the project.