Collapsing empires may often flail about in strange fashion before they go into the darkness. Recent developments in American political life brought those thoughts to my mind.
With an American presidential election just three months away, we have seen a series of remarkable, sometimes unprecedented developments impacting who will spend the next four years sitting in the Oval Office and controlling our government policy.
Four years ago President Joseph Biden replaced Donald Trump in the White House, and a month ago they held the first public debate of their rematch for the presidency. Many believed it demonstrated the total mental enfeeblement of our current chief executive, leading to widespread calls by leading Democratic Party financial donors and media pundits that Biden abandon the race at this very late stage.
In fairness I finally watched the full ninety-minute debate a couple of days ago and it entirely confirmed those claims of his serious mental impairment. Although Trump hardly seemed a brilliant policy expert, being just as blustery, boastful, and sometimes mistaken as always, he was as fully alert as he had been in 2020 or even 2016. But Biden came across as elderly and mentally befuddled, more like a nursing home patient than the plausible chief executive of the world’s global superpower. Many of his remarks recalled his repeated claims to have seen explicit photographic evidence of the 40 Israeli babies beheaded by Hamas militants, although that alleged incident was merely a ridiculous propaganda-hoax. Biden’s severe impairment also helps to explain why he had carefully avoided any direct conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin or Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Despite the obvious evidence of Biden’s incapacity to govern, his aides and close political allies strongly resisted the growing demand that he exit the race, noting that he had already won a long series of primaries and captured nearly all the Democratic delegates. However, these widespread public demands from the media suggested that they and our political elites had been concealing these facts from the public for some time and also raised natural questions about who exactly had been running our government over the last several years.
During the presidential debates of 1984, the hostile liberal media had claimed that President Ronald Reagan showed similar signs of elderly befuddlement and should therefore be rejected by the voters. But although there may have been a brief example or two of that, Reagan’s mental status seemed absolutely nothing like Biden’s, hardly surprising since the former was still in his early 70s while Biden is now 81.
Indeed, I think a much better analogy for Biden came with three of the last leaders of the decaying Soviet Empire of the 1980s, who nominally led that superpower even while senile or even comatose. In an article last summer I’d described that troubling analogy:
For Americans such as myself who came of age during the 1970s or early 1980s, the Soviet Union always carried the whiff of a decaying ideological empire, ruled by a decrepit political leadership class that had long since lost the trust of its own people.
Such was my opinion at the time, and nothing I have learned since then has changed it. Three Soviet leaders ruled during that era—Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko—all elderly and infirm, with the reigns of the last two being so brief that our own President Ronald Reagan once quipped that they died too rapidly for him to schedule a summit. Given that the top leaders of the USSR were so obviously enfeebled, analysts recognized that they were hardly the real decision-makers of the declining Soviet colossus that they nominally controlled; instead, most power was presumably vested in the hands of shifting coalitions of their senior aides and advisors, persons often obscure to the outside world. Perhaps partly as a consequence of this severe weakness at the top, the USSR entered a period of steep social and economic decline, and within just a few more years it had disappeared from the world.
All this was certainly true, but it is quite sobering to consult Wikipedia and discover the exact ages of those elderly Soviet leaders, who had been so widely ridiculed in the Western media as decrepit or even senile. Brezhnev was 75 when he died in 1982, while Andropov came to power at age 68 and died fifteen months later, replaced by his successor Chernenko, age 72, who only survived a year. So in today’s America, all those confused, befuddled Soviet leaders whom we regarded with such scorn would be youthful political figures compared to our own President Joe Biden, currently seeking reelection at the age of 80, or his leading rival, former President Donald Trump, age 77. Medical science has obviously advanced quite a bit in the last four decades, but I think the total Western domination of the global media is a more important factor in this large difference of perceptions. Is Biden really so much sharper than Brezhnev and Chernenko, or is it simply that our media is better at hiding his inability from most of the general public?
During his entire political career, Biden had been notorious for merely reading the scripts and speeches written for him by others, and even in his 40s he sometimes seemed completely unaware of the falsehoods and total absurdities he was spouting. Lately he has sometimes begun confusing our official positions on crucial policy matters, requiring his aides to quickly “clarify” them. I’m sure that Brezhnev or Chernenko would have done the same if they’d been put into that position.
Although he ranked as the world’s leading Communist, Brezhnev personally indulged himself by accumulating a large collection of luxury automobiles, including Maseratis, Rolls Royces, and Jaguars, an embarrassing story widely promoted by the powerful Western media as proof of Soviet hypocrisy. But although the direct evidence of the Hunter Biden laptop revealed that Biden and his family had taken many, many millions of dollars in secret payoffs from foreigners, our mainstream media has hidden that reality, so much of the public probably still remains unaware of it.
American Pravda: The Rise of the BRICS and the Fall of the USSA?
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 4, 2023 • 3,300 Words
Even as Biden stood his ground and refused those growing demands to step aside, the American political landscape was suddenly transformed by a nearly successful assassination attempt against Donald Trump, his Republican opponent. In a bizarre and highly-suspicious incident, Trump’s Secret Service detail inexplicably allowed a 20-year-old to freely position himself on a nearby rooftop with a rifle and fire several shots, the first of which slightly wounded the candidate and according to media reports came within an inch or two of killing him.
Although enormously hated and feared by most of the American political establishment, Trump was ahead in the polls and widely regarded as the odds-on favorite to regain the White House when this extremely strange lapse in presidential security nearly led to his death. Just after the incident, I’d noted in an article some of the very troubling questions it raised.
For more than eight years, most American elites have expressed a seething hatred of Trump, doing everything they could to frustrate his presidency, ensure his defeat in 2020, and then prevent him from regaining the White House in 2024. Soon after a mob of outraged Trumpists stormed the DC Capitol on January 7, 2021, I published an article pointing to the overwhelming evidence that the American media and our Internet giants, assisted by numerous dishonest former intelligence officers, had combined to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump:
American Pravda: Our Disputed Election
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 14, 2021 • 2,000 Words
…More recently as Trump’s efforts to regain the presidency moved forward, his bitter Democratic enemies launched a series of outrageous political prosecutions hoping that felony convictions and possible imprisonment would destroy Trump’s popularity with voters. But instead Trump’s polling numbers continued to rise, and his Republican renomination became assured.
American Pravda: Donald Trump, Eugene Debs, and AMLO
The American Political System as Laughingstock or Trainwreck
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 7, 2023 • 4,900 Words
Having failed at every step to block Trump’s rise, his political enemies were left with few available options. Their dilemma eventually led Tucker Carlson to publicly speculate that they would finally conclude that orchestrating Trump’s assassination was their best chance of preventing his triumphant return to the White House.
According to the media accounts, a young 20-year-old gunman named Thomas Matthew Crooks was somehow able to enter the vicinity of the Trump rally armed with an AR-15 rifle. He set himself up on the rooftop of a nearby building and fired several shots, one of which wounded Trump in the ear while another killed a bystander in the crowd, after which he himself was shot dead by counter-sniper fire from security personnel.
Allowing an armed gunman such an opportunity to potentially kill a leading presidential candidate obviously involved extremely serious lapses in security by the Secret Service agents guarding Trump and this has naturally provoked widespread suspicions that some sort of plot had been responsible. There have also been claims circulating on social media that bystanders noticed the gunman and alerted authorities, but instead of ordering the sniper shot or at least securing the candidate and taking him to safety, the security personnel waited until the prospective assassin had fired his potentially fatal shots before taking any action.
The Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 17, 2024 • 2,000 Words
Did Trump’s bitter political enemies conspire to have him killed by an assassin’s bullet, as had happened more than a half-century ago to President John F. Kennedy and then JFK’s younger brother Robert a few years later?
If so, I think an untrained 20-year-old nursing home employee like Crooks would hardly have been the logical choice as a presidential assassin, especially since he had no apparent motive. But that young man would have served as an absolutely ideal patsy or decoy, drawing the attention of the crowd and security personnel, while a highly professional sniper concealed elsewhere eliminated Trump. This was exactly the role played by Sirhan in RFK’s 1968 killing, and indeed, claims have circulated that a second gunman was spotted, while many others have argued that the acoustic record indicates that one or more additional snipers took part, thereby proving the existence of a conspiracy to kill Trump.
However, all this evidence has been heavily disputed and I don’t think I possess the technical expertise to properly evaluate it. Also, if a second, expert marksman had been firing I doubt that Trump would have been lucky enough to escape with nothing more serious than a minor flesh wound to his ear. Even if Trump had moved his head so that the first bullet narrowly missed him, I’d expect that a professional sniper would have fired several more shots, ensuring that he was hit.
Thus, although I find the circumstances of the attack on Trump highly suspicious, until more solid evidence comes out I still lean against any conspiracy to kill him, with Trump’s almost unscathed survival being the strongest grounds for my skepticism. However, if Trump had been killed or gravely wounded, I would probably lean in the opposite direction.
Despite my own position, I certainly understand why others would assume a conspiracy. Suppose, for example, that the shoe were on the other foot and President Putin had very narrowly escaped death from an assassin’s bullet while attending a public event in Russia. Surely our media and political pundits would almost uniformly declare that Putin’s internal enemies had been responsible and that this attack indicated that the Russian political system was spiraling towards severe domestic violent unrest and collapse. So can we insouciantly ignore the parallel case in our own country?
If Trump had died, many of his fervent followers would surely have reacted in dramatic fashion, being absolutely convinced that Deep State operatives had murdered him. Trump may be hated and feared by roughly half the country, including the overwhelming majority of its elites, but most of the other half regards him as their heroic champion, and his political martyrdom might easily have provoked a wave of domestic unrest and perhaps even retaliatory violence. According to most media accounts, an unexpected movement of Trump’s head saved him from likely death, and by accidentally dodging that bullet, the controversial presidential candidate may have allowed our entire society to dodge a metaphorical one.
Whether or not Trump had been targeted for death by his American enemies, the shooting certainly represented the most serious domestic assassination attempt in the decades since John Hinckley had shot and critically wounded President Reagan in 1980 almost 45 years ago. That latter incident marked the endpoint of seventeen years of such attempts on the lives of presidents or presidential candidates, beginning with JFK’s 1963 assassination and the 1968 assassination of his younger brother Robert just minutes after his victory in the winner-take-all California primary. Gov. George Wallace was crippled by an assassin’s bullet in 1972 and two different women took shots at President Gerald Ford in 1975. Those same years had also seen a series of other high-profile assassinations, including those of Malcolm X in 1965, George Lincoln Rockwell in 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, and John Lennon in 1980.
Given today’s sharply divided American society, even if Crooks were the deranged lone gunman that the media declares him to be, there’s a very real risk that his attack may spark the beginning of a new cycle of such violent incidents.
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