by William Skink

There aren’t many people I’ve continued reading after year zero of the Trump crisis because we are not in a Trump crisis and the year is 2019.

Michael Krieger’s Liberty Blitzkrieg blog has successfully avoided a monomaniacal focus on Trump by taking a step back and viewing both sides with suspicion. By doing so he is able to arrive at insights that partisans are simply not capable of. Here is the opening of his latest post, The Illiberal World Order:

From a big picture perspective, the largest rift in American politics is between those willing to admit reality and those clinging to a dishonest perception of a past that never actually existed. Ironically, those who most frequently use “post-truth” to describe our current era tend to be those with the most distorted view of what was really happening during the Clinton/Bush/Obama reign.

Despite massive amounts of evidence to the contrary, such people now enthusiastically whitewash the decades preceding Trump to turn it into a paragon of human liberty, justice and economic wonder. You don’t have to look deep to understand that resistance liberals are now actually conservatives, brimming with nostalgia for the days before significant numbers of people became wise to what’s been happening all along.

They want to forget about the bipartisan coverup of Saudi Arabia’s involvement in 9/11, all the wars based on lies, and the indisputable imperial crimes disclosed by Wikileaks, Snowden and others. They want to pretend Wall Street crooks weren’t bailed out and made even more powerful by the Bush/Obama tag team, despite ostensible ideological differences between the two. They want to forget Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself.

Our corporate media helps the public sleepwalk through the day by not highlighting information that could produce cognitive dissonance strong enough to wake them up, like the re-authorization of the Patriot Act last week by Democrats amidst the impeaching charade.

If one were to wake up the world would look much different. Here is some more assistance from Krieger:

Lying to yourself about history is one of the most dangerous things you can do. If you can’t accept where we’ve been, and that Trump’s election is a symptom of decades of rot as opposed to year zero of a dangerous new world, you’ll never come to any useful conclusions. As such, the most meaningful fracture in American society today is between those who’ve accepted that we’ve been lied to for a very long time, and those who think everything was perfectly fine before Trump. There’s no real room for a productive discussion between such groups because one of them just wants to get rid of orange man, while the other is focused on what’s to come. One side actually believes a liberal world order existed in the recent past, while the other fundamentally recognizes this was mostly propaganda based on myth.

The first 6 years of my blogging activities focused on how Democrats were lying to themselves about Obama, Clinton and the dangers posed by Neoliberalism. They couldn’t see how Obama continued developing the notion of a unitary executive, which was cooked up by the Neocons and implemented in the wake of 9/11. The branding of Obama was all they cared about, and if you described what the product was doing beyond the perception management of the labeling, they got very angry and defensive.

Now the only thing that matters is getting rid of bad orange man, and the two sides of that showdown consume two completely seperate narratives about what has transpired the past 3 years.

With the public dangerously dug in to their cognitive bunkers, what will happen when the economic everything bubble pops? Will we turn on each other, doing the work of culling the herd for our benevolent oligarchs, or will we create better local cooperative structures of real sustainability while the billionaires move off shore to their techno-islands to wait out the chaos on the mainland?

Quit it with the dystopia fiction, Skink, YOU are the delusional one!

Yeah, I hope I am. But I also know my history, and it’s not the fairytales we are told growing up. I opened my eyes a long time ago. You can to.