This website began in 2005 and continued weekly and sometimes daily until 2018. Its purpose was to comment on and interpret events in the USA (and occasionally the UK) within the context of the rise to power of the Media Class, America’s first genuine and thus revolutionary Ruling Class.
Karl Marx’s great claim was that economic classes had been the source of human division and conflict since the dawn of civilization. His particular categorization of classes – and his attempt to neatly dress them in the science of his day – unfortunately has led to the widespread dismissal of his concepts of “Class Interest,” “Class Conflict,” “Ruling Classes” and “Class Revolution”.
Marx based his research on European events – and particularly the industrial revolution in England – where class conflicts, economic, social and political, were sharply and cruelly exposed.
Two things need to be noted along the way.
- Marx further undermined his theory by seeking to use it, not only to promote radical political action and economic change, but also to clothe Socialism in the armor of historical and scientific inevitability.
- The new Nation State of America was uniquely created on almost-unoccupied land, by people escaping ruling classes, and arriving with nothing. They devised a constitutional framework they thought would be a permanent bulwark against “class rule” emerging.
This website maintains they were wrong.
Marx was right to claim that powerful groups (classes) are formed by the very occasional and accidental combination of advances in technology, favorable economic circumstances and weakened social mores. Such “perfect storms” are rare, and it does not automatically follow that a class thus created has the ingredients and potential power of an aspiring ruling class.
In 1709, when Telford’s Abraham Darby III began smelting iron with coke, he had no idea that he was preparing the way for an Industrial Revolution that would create a new class of industrialists. Very favorable circumstances enabled this new class to grow in power and wealth, acquire an identity, and develop a self-serving agenda that required the overthrow of the ruling aristocratic landowner class. The new class was revolutionary because it sought and won political/legislative power and the destruction of the old traditional culture. It used that legislative power in Parliament to remove and replace everything that stood in the way of its class interest. (Americans please note!)
That it won without a civil war has much to do with the willingness of the landowning class to abandon its dependent agricultural workers to poverty and join the new rulers in sharing the spoils and power. And like all new and numerically small ruling classes, it made alliances with minor classes to increase its reach and numbers.
By around the 1960s, film-making in Hollywood, radio as news and entertainment, and the invention of television, had created new economic classes in America, but they were rivals.
It took the sudden explosion of popular demand for television entertainment to bring together a new class with real power and huge potential. Full employment, a TV set in every American home and the expansion of shift work led to a lucrative market for 24-hour programing. This could only be met by the marriage of TV and Hollywood. TV simply could not produce enough entertainment to satisfy demand. It needed Hollywood’s films, actors and technicians. A marriage took place.
The final development that innocently gifted the emerging new class with awesome power was the abandonment of the distinction between news and entertainment. A camouflaged propaganda weapon was born. It is with us today and more powerful and insidious than anything yet devised by any past totalitarian regime.
When I began writing Radical and Right in 2005, I frequently described how the new Ruling Class had expanded by digesting advertising, fashion, professional sport, theater, and much more. But I had no idea that through internet communication for the masses, the tech giants of Silicon Valley would become dominant members of the new Ruling Media Class and enable it to silence free speech, recruit and intimidate business corporations, and brazenly and ruthlessly persecute all who resisted.
It could be argued that the Industrial Class, which pushed aside the old aristocracy, nevertheless was in many ways a force for progress. Its members were very moderate social revolutionaries and not interested in erasing 2000 years of hard-earned Christian wisdom and its Greek and Roman precursors. Many were craftsmen who invented things, and few were ideologues.
The Media Class, whose roots lie in Hollywood, the artificial world of theater, and the Arts, manufactures make-belief as its prime product. Its workers and practitioners have always been dominated by fugitives from the real world, attracted by its offer of escape from the bonds of normality. It is a dangerous mix of sexual perverts, sexual predators, psychopaths, narcissists, neurotics, drug addicts and permanently dysfunctional children. As a Ruling Class and like all ruling classes in history, its members are driven to remake society in their own collective image. This essential task is revolutionary and the goal requires the forcible erasure of the old society, its history and – most of all – its morality.
Somewhere around the 1970s, the emerging Ruling Class, as befits a movement driven by a revolutionary quest for power, began purging its own house of remnants of the old culture. Harmless, moral and popular family shows were gradually eliminated (e.g. The Honeymooners). The people’s comedy shows, gently poking fun at all aspects of life and all human beings, often expertly acted and scripted (Nat Hiken’s Phil Silvers Show and Car 54) but rarely politically partisan – and never shocking and never profane – were systematically purged and replaced by talentless young pretenders with a nihilistic political agenda, dirty talk and all marching to a radical, anti-family Feminist agenda.
Into the archives went the old crime and Western themes in which good triumphed over evil, men were chivalrous and women were feminine. Militant, emotionally unhappy – usually lesbian, bi-sexual or the sexually insatiable – feminists were welcomed into the Media Class ranks where they had access to the bully pulpit. They created a new language of victimization with which they attacked the traditional family, Christianity, maleness, reproduction, normal humor and normal male/female relationships.
If you have read this far and recognize the Ruling Media Class at work in your life and in America’s politics, you will be truly “woke.”
Having purged its own house of reactionary cultural elements, the Media Class emerged strengthened by inner discipline and in need of a political party to capture legislative power. A revolutionary mission to replace “old-fashioned” morality and traditional culture required a party of the Left and – ideally – one with a mass following. The cultural purging of the Democratic Party (and its ancillary Unions) began.
The MSM (Mainstream Media) created litmus tests for candidates for office, awarding good publicity to those it favored, and bad publicity to those who represented “old” values. Leftist economic policies, though supported by the MSM, took second place to abortion, homosexual normalization and all those behaviors that may be categorized as permissive. “Permissive” stretched to a woman choosing to be a single parent (a Feminist priority) and having a welfare right in place of the income and role that a man would have provided. It soon became impossible for a Democratic Party office-holder at any level, even rank-and file membership, to be pro-life or to point out that African-Americans would suffer by abandoning marriage.
The Democratic Party began to part company with much of the working class at this point. Those industrial workers drifting away were replaced by the growth of the government white-collar workforce and government unions who could afford to promote ‘moral’ issues over economic ones.
In 2008, the MSM chose Barack Obama to be President. For eight years, with the pen, the phone, the connivance of the Courts, the energetic approval of the MSM, and the surrender of the self-serving Republicans in Congress, he quietly took America to the cusp of a completed revolution. By the end of his Presidency, traditional marriage had been devalued; the Courts had been packed with Far Leftists; the highest ranks of the military, the FBI and CIA had been purged of patriots and seeded with perverts; and federal government institutions had been fully politicized with radical activists. None of this could have been achieved without the approval and absolute complicity of America’s journalists – and the gutlessness of most Republican legislators.
It remained only for the Media Class and its Far-Left allies to win Congress and the Presidency in November 2016. Total control of the legislative process would cement the final seamless transformation of the USA into a revolutionary new society, spirited by legal means and without violence, past a somnambulant American people.
The ambitious, totally unscrupulous Hillary Clinton was judged a willing tool in the White House to preside over the transition and going forward to front the new regime. The first Black President was to be followed by the first woman President, two meaningless qualifications but drenched in shallow symbolism for a genuinely Revolutionary era.
Jeb Bush was adjudged by the impatient Ruling Media Class to be the perfect Republican ‘loser,’ though the rest of the pack of Republican office-holding time-servers, vying for the approaching electoral defeat, were little better.
As the Media Class scribblers and wafflers prepared to coronate Hillary Clinton, a jester emerged from the Republican pack.
The next article will assess the character of Donald Trump and the awakening of the people’s nationalism.
JESTER: one who jokes; buffoon
JOKER: one who jokes; an extra card printed with a comic device counting as the highest trump
The rules of the game seemed to be set for the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton was going to get her turn in the White House, a just reward for acceding to the Media Class/Left Coalition’s choice of the first black man in 2008, for swallowing the primary fix, and for serving Obama loyally for eight long years. This time it was neo-Trotskyite Bernie Sanders who got fixed in the primary. Like all good Leftists, he too acceded gracefully.
The first woman President to follow the first black President was a script designed to complete the picture of a Democratic Party that was unarguably progressive and inclusive. As if to nicely underline the contrast, the Republican Party, with MSM approval, was about to pick Jeb Bush – white, male, country club and insipid. Bush was ideally suited to play the obliging fall guy at the Hillary coronation. What could go wrong with this blueprint for sleepwalking America into the final painless stage of totalitarianism?
And then the Deity intervened with irony and injected Donald Trump into the Republican primary. Who would take seriously a man with that hairstyle, an outsize ego only satisfied by erecting tall buildings in New York, a taste for exotic wives, a talent for promoting tasteless talent TV shows, and an unprincipled dabbler in politics?
At the outset almost every expert misjudged and underestimated Donald Trump. Many thought he was joking, continuing his pursuit of shallow publicity, topping up a dwindling bank balance, a buffoon, and for certain, not serious about politics.
But early on, Radical and Right, maverick talk show host Michael Savage and a few others detected in Trump a genuine love of country and its workers. His was a lone voice saying it was time to halt the betrayal of America’s workers on the conservative altar of free markets, international free trade and open borders.
Did Donald Trump know what he was getting himself (and his family) into? Almost certainly not! It is clear that Trump had never studied political history, and his experience of politics never stretched beyond wheeling and dealing with corrupt NY politicians and unions. It is also certain that his past success in the media entertainment world led him to believe that he would get favorable MSM treatment and be moving among friends.
Trump naively stumbled into an issue that was anathema to both the internationalist Left and the globalist “center-right” – nationalism. Since World War II it had been branded a dirty word. Several powerful hidden interest groups had their own reasons for placing it and its advocates beyond the pale.
It was painted by academia and the MSM as “selfish,” “outdated,” “narrow-minded,” “intolerant,” “reactionary,” “bigoted,” “phobic,” “divisive”, and – if that was not enough – racist, rooted in Nazism, Fascism, and the cause of wars.
The Republican Party leadership, long dominated by a mix of self-interested globalists and free-market ideologues, had perfected the art of waving the flag at election time and then quickly packing it away. Trump said enough on the hustings to set himself apart as a genuine – if muddled – nationalist. A border wall, troop withdrawals from foreign countries, American workers first and a rag-bag of similar views were enough to stir nationalist sentiment in rank-and-file Republicans, industrial workers and many who had long abandoned party politics. Crucially, when the anti-nationalists in the MSM and the swamp woke to the Trump threat and attacked, he doubled down.
Trump’s victory in the Republican primary is history and need not be reworked here, but the important event of the following Presidential election campaign was that the MSM elbowed aside the Democratic Party’s leadership and campaigned openly to defeat him. At last it was apparent to all who had eyes to see, ears to hear and a brain, that as Radical and Right had long maintained, the Democratic Party was the creature of the MSM (Media Class) and not the other way around.
The Trump campaign style, in both the primaries and in the contest with Clinton, was unlike anything in modern history. His weaknesses and strengths were soon on display and they continue undiminished, even after more than three years in the White House.
His worst traits of impulsiveness, recklessness, childishness and pettiness were on display in the televised debates and have been amplified ever since by his nightly addiction to Twitter. One example will suffice and that was his unnecessary attack on McCain’s courage. In politics as in real life there are things that may be true but are better left unsaid. However, on other occasions his childish personal attacks on opponents have scored – among them “crooked Hillary,” “low energy Jeb,” the “lying Media,” and “Fake News.”
Still, for many of us on the demoralized Right, his refusal to ever apologize, no matter how big a storm the MSM creates, was – and is – hugely inspiring. Trump never retracts or retreats and instead counter-attacks twice as hard, in stark contrast to just about every other public figure on the Right. Here lies one of his core strengths. He is tough!
In the campaign against Clinton, Trump withstood vicious MSM treatment that dwarfed the war waged against Reagan. Not once did he wilt. His energy, despite his age, was phenomenal, as he criss-crossed the Nation, addressing the American workers at well-organized, cleverly crafted mass rallies. The rallies broke records for attendance and revived and transformed the base of the Republican Party, leaving the old, globalist party leadership on the sidelines. Although lacking oratory skills and message discipline, Trump revealed an impressive ability to connect with ordinary people, in stark contrast to Hillary Clinton. This earthy, coarse connection infuriated and affronted not only the MSM, but the Republican Party’s Washington literati – and none more so than Peggy Noonan. We have learned that Trump, being on the moral side of the abortion and many other long-held conservative issues, has counted for nothing for these intellectual snobs, compared to his inability to hold a teaspoon correctly.
The wholly unprincipled, non-stop MSM attacks drove Trump, who lacked an ideology, further into the Nationalist camp. And as we forecast on Radical and Right at the time, the army of populists who flocked to his rallies, displaying their patriotism, have created a populist leader in their own image.
It is doubtful that Trump yet fully understands that his raising of the Nationalist flag, and his mobilization of a Nationalist people, deprived – at five minutes to twelve – the Ruling Media Class, its Leftist allies and hangers on in the government bureaucracy of the peaceful and covert completion of a genuine Revolution.
In the three plus years since his narrow victory, we are astonished that this amazing President has not been brought down either by a palace coup, orchestrated mob street violence, or an assassination. Counter-revolution, denying final power to a new Ruling Class, is a very dangerous business.
We are approaching an election in which the only issue is this: will Americans deny the Revolutionaries the complete transformation of their Nation, and begin the process of rooting out the Media/Leftist cancer before it is too late? We have Trump, a very flawed leader, but one who has courage and energy; is battle-hardened; and – contrary to the propagandist MSM image – is a uniter. Now is not the time to look for perfection.