Originally published via The Daily Bell:
Like Shakespeare said, “all the [political] world’s a stage.”
National-level US electoral politics are a performance.
The audience is the population; the actors are the politicians; the generous patrons of the arts are the oligarchs. The purpose is paralysis and pacification, to keep the population wedded to the idea that its voice matters in a “democracy.”
The objective reality is that popular opinion doesn’t matter one iota to elite decision-makers. But, as long as they can convince enough of the NPC electorate that it does, the hope is that they can stymy any popular resistance to the regime by funneling voters’ angst into pointless elections.
Hence the “democracy” façade.
No other explanation other than the theatrical suffices for why the Democrat Party is bankrolling the most fervent “stop the steal” Republicans in national races from Pennsylvania to Arizona.
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In April 2015 — before Trump’s infamous “Mexicans are rapists” announcement speech, before the “grab ’em by the pussy” leak — Hillary Clinton Inc. devised a “pied piper” strategy. She plotted to deploy her cronies in the corporate media and DNC machinery to “elevate” Donald Trump in the GOP primary.
Per the pied piper strategy, as evidenced in leaked emails published by Wikileaks (free Julian Assange!), Clinton wanted to use Trump “as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right.” The intended effect was “to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to a majority of the electorate.”
Presumably to this end, and also because Trump’s bombastic and energetic speeches drew eyeballs, the corporate press gave Trump $5 billion in free media coverage throughout the primary campaign – all while feigning outrage at his racism, misogyny, etc.
The idea was that Clinton and her media proxies could prop up Trump, drive the GOP base to the “far right,” and get an easier opponent to beat in the general election as a result.
Hillary Clinton, aka Dr. Frankenstein 2.0, built a monster, and it devoured her in the general election. She’s still trying to find something, anything to blame besides herself – Russia, racism, Jill Stein.
Obviously, the pied piper strategy backfired.
But there’s nothing new under the sun. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, so the democrats are back at it again in the 2022 GOP primaries:
“Political groups and nonprofits aligned with the Democratic Party have spent nearly $44 million on advertising campaigns across five states’ Republican primaries to boost the profile of far-right candidates in California, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Maryland.
Democrats’ strategy is rooted in the belief that these candidates — many of whom spread unfounded claims that the 2020 presidential race was stolen from former President Donald Trump — will be easier to defeat in a general election.”
In many cases, Democrats have spent more money in the 2022 primaries backing “far-right” candidates than the candidate and his/her opponents’ campaigns combined.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is even bankrolling the primary opponents of Peter Meijer, one of ten total congressional GOP members to vote for Trump’s 2021 impeachment.
So much for “saving democracy.”
If saving democracy from the orange fascist were truly the objective, why would the Democrat Party back the challenger to one of the lone dissenting voices in Congress who voted to remove him?
All told, as of mid-July, “political groups and nonprofits aligned with the Democratic Party have spent nearly $44 million on advertising campaigns across five states’ Republican primaries.”
Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt: the CNN pundits in the above clip might actually be too stupid to understand what’s going on. Their bafflement and outrage might be genuine. Indeed, they’re hired for their compromised intellect and lack of insight; it’s essentially a job requirement.
But their bosses in corporate leadership, who are political actors cozy with the Deep State and not journalists, understand the game well.
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None of the Democrats’ funding of opposition primary races, you will notice, is remotely connected to any sincerely-held ideological commitments. The entire purpose is equal parts cynical electioneering and social engineering.
Rigging the primaries to get an easy opponent in the general is only part of the strategy. The other objective is even more nefarious.
The corporate state needs its synthetic “Ultra MAGA,” “far-right,” “white supremacist,” “domestic terrorist” boogeyman.
“Ultra MAGA” is a hilariously inept focus-grouped phrase, the anticlimactic final product of six months of “research” headed by Biden adviser Anita Dunn and the DC think tank Center for American Progress Action Fund.
The intended effect of “Ultra MAGA” is to induce maximum fear in the public. The actual effect is to make Ultra MAGA republicans look cool and subversive, even when they serve the corporate state’s priorities, as milquetoast Trump himself mostly did.
The corporate state needs an excuse to continually increase the domestic surveillance and police state budget to counter “domestic extremism.” Without one, it might prove unable to justify its current war on “domestic terror” – code for “anyone opposed to the state’s technocratic takeover agenda in any way.”
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Source: The New York Times
“Right-wing insurgents” have replaced Al-Qaeda in the Two Minutes Hate. Proliferating that threat, including getting them elected to national office in sufficient numbers, is their grifty golden goose.
The MAGA specter serves their interests, and so they require its presence in representative government – not large enough or ideologically committed enough to ever exercise real power or effectively challenge corporate state hegemony, but large enough to terrify Blue MAGA into enabling the construction of a technocratic police state.
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via Armageddon Prose and/or Substack, Patreon, Gab, and Twitter.
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