It’s time to admit it now. Trump fought the Borg, and the Borg won. Not that he engaged the Deep State skillfully or systematically. He didn’t. Was it his fault? Not entirely.

Few Americans suspected exactly how systemic the rot was. Trump certainly didn’t. Or else he would have responded to the Russia collusion hoax by disbanding the FBI. Then building a new agency from scratch, with lawmen from small towns in the South. Chuck Schumer warned Trump that the Deep State would have its revenge, and so it did.

Trump should have his revenge before leaving office. He should pardon Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. He should not just declassify every document that could cripple or expose the Deep State. He should demand the files in person, and hand walk them to Wikileaks. Then make sure they’re safely on servers in friendly countries like Poland and Hungary. 

Unelected, Unfireable, Implacable

Neither he nor we wanted to admit what now is obvious about our country. Namely, where virtually all of the power to spend our tax money, prosecute citizens, redeploy our soldiers, or pursue crucial policies lies. It lies in the hands of unelected, unfireable bureaucrats. Worse, those career employees think as a collective. They act in exquisite unison like a colony of termites. So do the leaders of massive corporations, including media and social media giants. Together they make up the Hive Mind which sees American freedom as a rusty, embarrassing relic. Something like a segregated water fountain.

These elites are throwing tens of thousands of people off Twitter and Facebook, including Trump himself. They’re conspiring to crush the alternative platform Parler, to shut it down completely, unless it starts censoring speech. Senator Josh Hawley just got his book contract canceled. Why? For daring to question election fraud. The crackdown on opposition to the Biden family takeover is coordinated and ruthless, even before his inauguration. (He learned a thing or two from the CCP while they lined the Biden, Inc. pockets.)

All these governing elites answer to some higher power. But it’s not the president or Congress. We have no leverage to change it with our votes. Appointing Republicans to head up departments won’t let us clean house. It amounts to facing a seven-layer cake made out of rat poison, and replacing … the cherry on top.

Voters? We Don’t Need No Stinking Voters

The latest headline demonstrating this sobering truth comes from the Washington Post: 

Staffers at Voice of America, the government-funded international news organization, have filed a whistleblower complaint raising concerns about an upcoming address by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, saying it would be risky for them to gather at the agency’s headquarters amid the coronavirus pandemic and that orders to broadcast his speech amount to promoting “propaganda.”

None of these pencil-pushers were elected. Donald Trump was, and he appointed Mike Pompeo, and Michael Pack to head the VOA’s parent agency. But that doesn’t mean these employees will obey. They’re loyal all right — to the Hive.

Even worse, as we’ve seen this week with Republicans turning on Trump: the talent pool from which a president like Trump (or a future president Hawley) can rise is tainted beyond redemption. No, he should never have hired Bill Barr, or Christopher Wray, or Mick Mulvaney, or … the list goes on and on. But whom should he have hired instead? Why think they’d be any better?

Every Ant Is Interchangeable

One Brahmin or another is pretty much as interchangeable as fire ants plucked off the very same hill. Whatever instructions you give them, they’ll do what the pheromones they pick up with their antennae tell them. Few of them will diverge from their caste interests: It’s not worth the angry emails they’ll get from their old college friends. Or the stinkeye their wives will face at the country club.

Our governing classes of either party are indeed fanatically loyal. But not to us. Not to our country, their own churches, or even the Constitution. They are loyal to themselves, and people who dress, and act, and talk, exactly as they do. Conservative scholar Angelo Codevilla wrote prophetically of this back in 2016.

In today’s America, a network of executive, judicial, bureaucratic, and social kinship channels bypasses the sovereignty of citizens. Our imperial regime, already in force, works on a simple principle: the president and the cronies who populate these channels may do whatever they like so long as the bureaucracy obeys and one third plus one of the Senate protects him from impeachment.

If you are on the right side of that network, you can make up the rules as you go along, ignore or violate any number of laws, obfuscate or commit perjury about what you are doing (in the unlikely case they put you under oath), and be certain of your peers’ support. These cronies’ shared social and intellectual identity stems from the uniform education they have received in the universities. Because disdain for ordinary Americans is this ruling class’s chief feature, its members can be equally certain that all will join in celebrating each, and in demonizing their respective opponents.

And, because the ruling class blurs the distinction between public and private business, connection to that class has become the principal way of getting rich in America. [emphasis added]

The Queen Is Not Elected

What sank the Trump administration, guaranteeing that he couldn’t even defeat clumsy election fraud? Codevilla warned us that the System only works if “the bureaucracy obeys.” But it never obeyed Trump, not for one day in four years. Instead it carried right on with the policies set by Obama, including the schemes for spying on Trump and trying to kick him out of office. Why? Because he was loyal to the country, his own family, and the voters. Instead of putting our Ruling Caste above all.

We face a governing Brahmin caste system of people who went to a small selection of schools, and live in just a few zip codes. Their children go to school together and marry each other. And that caste agrees on the only important thing: the rest of the country are hapless Untouchables. Look at how KellyAnne Conway’s daughter fared at her elite D.C. prep school. She turned against her own mother, but won the approval of her insufferable, coddled peers.

Deplorables or Untouchables

Hillary Clinton slipped up when she said the Quiet Part out loud, referring to “Deplorables.” But the reality was plain to Charles Murray decades ago, when he wrote The Bell Curve. Our “cognitive elites,” the people who run America, hated that book. Not because of the short, ill-advised section on race and IQ, but because it exposed their very existence and warned of how stultifying their rule was becoming. These people are fanatically loyal to their caste and cult. When protesters burst into the Capitol, the reaction among the Brahmins was instant and bipartisan, as if a herd of pigs had stormed into the Holy of Holies. Our elites revolted like Maccabees against this historic profanation. Contrast that with the blasé acceptance of working class neighborhoods torched by Antifa and Black Lives Matter last spring. “Oh well, urban youths will be urban youths,” elites tittered across the country. “And isn’t it all exciting? Like Woodstock.”

The Woke cult that has swept our elites is incoherent, it’s easy to note. You can’t logically use the ruthless, random nihilism that Darwinism asserts as the ground for either human rights or equality. But Wokeness’ feet of clay don’t make it any less intolerant or powerful. The Nazi ideology was a howling mass of incompatible claims — pseudo-science, social Darwinism, and murky Teutonic occultism. Clever critiques in academic journals didn’t bring it down. They never made a dent.

Call Out the Lies

Can we make a dent in the monstrosity we face in what once was America? Each of us can in little ways. As Solzhenitsyn admonished us, we can refuse to live by lies. We saw our media pile up a vast, Pharaonic pyramid of lies about Donald Trump and his supporters. We were racists colluding with Russia to put gang rapists on the Supreme Court, to sum things up. These same media expected us to believe them when they assured us the election wasn’t fraudulent. And we refused, by the tens of millions. That wasn’t the end of the new, and desperately needed, Christian Nationalist movement (as I define it.) Instead, it was the start.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”