We Are No Closer To Blowing Up The Death Star
Its gotta get really bad before it gets better...
Its been 3.5 years since I first noticed the Death Star in our orbit. I am afraid we may have many more years to go until we find the thermal exhaust port and blow it up.
Why am I pessimistic? Well, three separate observations lead me to believe that we just aren’t ready yet. There is no rebellion. Is one brewing? Yes. Has it hit the masses yet? No.
Party Like Its 2020
I attended the Brownstone event last weekend. Lots of good things are happening at Brownstone and I recommend subscribing to and supporting their publication.
But I left there uninspired. This despite meeting and listening to some of the top voices of the (Team Reality) Rebel Alliance.
Jeffrey Tucker, who launched the Brownstone endeavor is a brilliant mind. But he was unable to demonstrate the ability to build community and/or cast a vision. The event was a mishmash of disjointed questions, lackluster moderation, odd fund raising and repeated adulations for the host.
There is certainly community amongst the Brownstone “Fellows” who make up the writing and thinking horsepower for this particular think tank—Brownstone has engaged some of the heroes of the Resistance.
But a movement is powered by an army of nobodies who move in a common direction. Many of us showed up looking for leadership, engagement and inspiration. But not a single component of the Brownstone event was dedicated to the commoners who attended. No ice breakers or meet your neighbors. No signups for subcommittees. Just talk of community without engaging the community in the room.
And apart from some rushed bullets presented by Toby Rogers, who seems to understand the importance of having a plan, there were no strategies laid out regarding “what’s next” or “where do we go from here.” There was no workshopping. No structured collaborations. No call to a common objective. Even the Q&A times after each panel were abbreviated or skipped altogether.
Worse, it was all “so 2020.” Its as if we are all still happy to live in the silos of
”Covid” or “George Floyd” as opposed to stepping back to define where all of these Progressive catastrophes came from and then organizing a defined counter-point.
My guess is that most people who will spend money to attend these Team Reality events are looking for more than hero worship. They are looking for a new hope. And until these symposiums and meet ups start inspiring and leading, the X-wing fighter will remain at the bottom of the swamp.
The Leftist Next Door
Not long after I got home from the Brownstone event the results of the election came in.
Once again, the results confirmed that city voters want to live under a feudal system and not a federal democratic republic.
It is natural for the pundits to blame the Republicans over “the abortion issue.” But I’m not sure that is the crux of the problem, especially when you see what is happening at the local level. Namely, the school boards.
The Epoch Times described the shellacking that Republican-endorsed candidates got in Virginia, for example. Here are some snippets:
In Loudoun County, Virginia, ground zero for the parental rights fight, all nine school board seats were up for grabs this year. Eight candidates ran on the issue and obtained Republican endorsements. Only two were successful—one by just 185 votes, or 1 percent of the total—against Democrat-backed candidates who consider the other side's push for parental rights to be “right-wing rhetoric.”
In Spotsylvania County…control of the school board flipped for the second time in three years. Candidates who ran on a parental rights platform for the four open seats were defeated, surrendering the majority.
Fairfax County…(c)andidates endorsed by the Democratic Party won all 12 seats by wide margins.
How, at this point, can conservatives and independents not be winning every school board seat? Let’s see, test scores are down, there are boys in girls bathrooms, administrations support drag queen story hours, the unions locked kids out of schools for nearly 2 years (in many cases), teachers are pushing for 4 day weeks, critical theories of race and gender are being practiced, and the overtly racist anti-racism mantra has most white kids feeling like they are some kind of innate “oppressor.”
And how can you blame school board elections on abortion?
You can’t.
The reality is: a majority of people in cities and suburbs want this. They want the State to be their nanny. They prefer safety over freedom. And they have no problem being the serfs in a class-based system where elite overlords live by a different set of rules while establishing the moral standards for the peasants from their clubs in Switzerland.
And I think we are past the time where we can give a break to our “non-political” friends. You know, the ones who don’t really watch the news but also don’t really use social media for information. If masking and lockdowns and vax mandates and digital currency and BLM and trans activists and Antifa and drag queen story hour have not lit a fire under you, then I am not sure how valuable you will be in the upcoming civil war or gulags or Alderaan-like catastrophe or whatever else is coming.
The Elites’ Echo Chamber
If you live in Palo Alto or the Upper West Side you live amongst other people who have followed the same general pathway: private school education, top university, top job in academia or Wall Street, atheist, Liberal, Democrat. We all have our echo chambers, but none is more dismissive than those of the coastal elites.
This morning I listened to a YouTube video of Fei Fei Li and George Hinton, two foundational minds in Artificial Intelligence.
Most of it was technical talk about how the technology of neural networks has evolved to this point. But later in the conversation they started opining on the risks of AI.
What jumped out to me was their concern about the use of AI to drive “misinformation” during the upcoming 2024 election. And though they didn’t explicitly say, the implication was that their concern was more about “alignment” than a principled concern about misinformation or censorship.
In AI, ‘alignment’ is essentially censorship. More specifically, a machine learing model is “aligned” when it is guided to do what the engineers want it to do. For example, if you ask ChatGPT how to build a bomb, it won’t tell you (well, you can hack it, but that is a different story) because it has been guided (aligned) away from that response. ChatGPT is censored by its creators.
All AI’s are aligned to whatever their creators want. Humans put their final touches on AI’s before they are unleashed to the public. Uncensored, unaligned machine learning models don’t exist because we curate the models to our values.
Fei Fei and George, life-long academic cross-overs to Big Tech, are concerned about the 2024 election, not because they have a principled viewpoint on misinformation. No, they are afraid that rogue AI’s—in other words models that are not aligned to their values—might skew the election against the candidates they favor.
This is very troubling. Their concern is not AI manipulating election outcomes but that their favored policies won’t be enacted or protected. They could not imagine a world where the virtues that they hold dearly are not all that virtuous.
Within the Death Star there does not appear to be any concern that the they are working for the enemy. In fact, most have never been outside of the Death Star. They live in a closed system. Most couldn’t find Missouri on the map. Worse, they could not comprehend why they would ever need to.
It’s Gotta Get Worse Before It Gets Better
There is no way to bounce off this crisis. Elections don’t matter. The Troublemakers are embedded on all sides. You think Mitch McConnell is on your side? This a class war. AOC is upper class and she hates you.
Meanwhile, the underclass soil is ripe for totalitarianism. Did Californians freak out when Gavin Newsom blatantly broke his own Covid mandates? No. Chicagoans never protested Lori Lightfoot getting her hair done when no one else was allowed to. Look, until the masses start to recoil from the boot on their neck, things are only going to continue to deteriorate.
There is no skipping off these waters. We must dive in.
The people who want drag shows in elementary schools need to have their daughters’ bathrooms disappear and have boys win all the girls’ state championships. The cities need to have their police defunded and crime to skyrocket. The perma-maskers and vax-nazis need to have their relatives die at age 22 of a cardiac-related sudden death.
They need to eat bugs.
Only when they are unable to buy ice cream because their centralized digital currency is locking them out because they are over their carbon limit…
Only when election fraud hits their favored candidate’s Democrat primary race…
Only when the District Attorney they voted for can’t protect their minivans from car jackings in their neighborhoods…
Then and only then can we get through this. And even then there is no guarantee that freedom sits on the other side. Odds are just as good that a feudal/fascist/communist hybrid beats us to the door.
We have 5-10 more years of this I believe. Yeah that sucks. But there is no way to get through this without going through this.
Okay if you made it this far you might enjoy this classic from Robot Chicken:
I love Star Wars, so allow me to engage with the metaphor.
We are not yet at "A New Hope"; we are at the beginning of Rogue One. You can decide who's who.
The Rebel Alliance Proper is run by a mix of bureaucrat, politician, and military types, most of whom have hearts and minds in the right place, but who aren't always willing or able to see what there is to see or do the right and best things. They often mistake bad guys for good guys and vice versa. The Cassian Andors among them are smart, and fear very little, but are also susceptible to the bureaucratic hive mind.
Then we've got the Saw Guerreras. 100% committed to the "Get Rid of the Empire" cause but aren't a part of the formal structure, go off the deep end a bit, and use strategies someone with the pedigree of Mon Mothma and Bail Organa prefer not to employ until/unless absolutely necessary.
As a defector pilot, Bodhi once was blind but now he sees (thanks to Galen) and is All In. Just tell him what to do and he'll do it. His "Former Empire" reputation is easily surmounted because the sincerity and passion convince you he now gets it and is willing to make huge sacrifices and lend his skills to the resistance.
The monk-like Chirrut answers to a higher calling/duty -- as does Baze, a "guardian" of Chirrut. They get enlisted by happenstance, though Chirrut would say there are no accidents and the Force is pulling him toward his purpose/role in the bigger picture of protecting that which must be protected at all costs.
What about Jyn? Answers only to herself, isn't interested in anything having to do with politics or the RA per se, even though, arguably, the Empire hurt her more directly than any other character. (They killed her mom kidnapped her Dad as she watched, for heaven's sake!) But she's been burned by Saw and learned she can only rely on herself. RA finds & leverages her for their cause...which she sort of rejects in principles but goes along with in exchange for the promise of freedom. Her full-on participation in the cause ends up being motivated by her Dad (realizing his mission to destroy that which he helped create).
If Galen Erso is among us, by definition of his role, we wouldn't know it yet. :)
All that to say, in Rogue One, we have different people with different motives coming together more by accident than by "Plan" per se, who unite in a common purpose. As we know, getting the Death Star schematic was only a beginning, even after the first Death Star was destroyed. The Empire built another one, and then another one, etc. It was The Empire itself that needed to go down -- not just its weapons.
Neither subjugation and subservience nor resolution via domestic war in 10 to 20 years is acceptable. There is a third option for some and I for one will be taking it. Best wishes to all Americans, of course, but goodbye.