At this point, they are laying the groundwork towards a civil war
Straight out of the STASI playbook.
Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
On September 18 of the year 96 AD, a fairly obscure and elderly politician named Marcus Cocceius Nerva was proclaimed Emperor of Rome by the Senate.
Rome was in chaos at the time; the empire had suffered from years of turmoil, economic decline, and oppression.
Most of the last several emperors– going back before the suicide of Nero in 68 AD– had been extremely destructive… plundering the treasury, waging expensive wars, and dismantling individual liberty.
The government was also extremely unstable; it was not uncommon at that point for emperors to be deposed or even assassinated.
In fact, Nerva’s predecessor– the emperor Domitian– had literally been murdered that morning.
Nerva was seen by many Senators as the ‘safe choice’ to take over the government. He was old, frail, and sick… so he wasn’t expected to last very long.
Most of all, Nerva was completely unremarkable.
He had spent his entire professional life in the service of the Empire, yet his name is barely mentioned in any historical record or associated with any major achievement.
But ‘unremarkable’ was exactly what Romans felt like they needed at the time: Nerva would be a break from the chaos. Or so they thought.
We know now with the benefit of hindsight that Rome would never fully recover.
There would be a few ‘good’ emperors along the way– people like Marcus Aurelius who were able to temporarily hold back the decline.
But the long-term trends were unstoppable.
Rome was slowly going bankrupt, destroying its currency, and rejecting the basic principles of its civilization that made it so powerful and prosperous to begin with.
And no politician was able to put the brakes on those big trends and reverse the inevitable decline.
This is a common theme throughout history: empires rise and fall, not because of a single individual, but from decades of major trends that gradually cause an inevitable decline.
These same trends keep surfacing over and over again across the centuries.
Economic mismanagement is an obvious one: empires in decline almost invariably hold an arrogant belief that they are exempt from the natural laws of finance.
In other words, they believe they can spend as much as they want, accumulate infinite amounts of debt, and debase their currency without limit, and somehow there won’t be any consequences.
Another trend is that the empire abandons its core values. Integrity, civic-mindedness, and hard work give way to corruption and entitlement.
And perhaps the biggest trend of empires in decline is that society frequently turns on itself. Civility ends, and rage takes over.
It goes without saying that these trends are alive and well in the West today, especially in the Land of the Free.
US finances have been in disarray for decades. Just this year alone, the national debt has grown by $4 trillion and the Federal Reserve has conjured another $3 trillion out of thin air.
And even before Covid struck when the economy was firing on all cylinders, the government was still adding more than $1 trillion each year to the debt.
Now there are entire factions of politicians that want to take those numbers to the next level.
In fact, there’s an entire school of economics now called “Modern Monetary Theory” which poses that governments can simply print as much money as they want without consequence.
This is pretty classic empire arrogance.
But, again, the even more powerful trend now is the growing rage that’s so prevalent.
We’ve seen it unfold in front of our very eyes– violence, arson, assault, looting, vandalism, intimidation.
And if the this angry mob isn’t out in the streets causing mayhem, they’re on social media trying to destroy someone’s life who committed the thoughtcrime of intellectual dissent.
The election results last week proved that this angry mob is still a numerical minority.
Unfortunately they are a very powerful minority that has taken over a number of important institutions.
They already control the media. Objective journalism doesn’t exist anymore– it’s just activism and propaganda.
(And if anyone needs any proof, look no further than a prominent CNN ‘reporter’ weeping tears of joy over the weekend on live television. How can these people expect to be taken seriously as objective journalists??)
The mob has also taken over education too.
Schools and universities are now filled with enraged Marxists who spend dozens of hours each week indoctrinating our children with their new woke religion.
They’ve even reinvented science, history, and mathematics to conform to the principles of critical race theory.
The mob also exerts extreme influence over major corporations.
You can’t watch a Disney movie, or an NFL game, or even a commercial for men’s razors anymore, without having identity politics shoved down your throat.
They also hold extreme influence over Big Tech, whose one-sided censorship policies have become so absurd they’re starting to rival the Chinese Communist Party.
Over the weekend, for example, Twitter was ablaze with activists who launched an ‘accountability project’ to create a database archiving every supporter, donor, staffer, etc. who supported the current Presidential administration.
The project’s tagline is “Remember what they did,” and “We must never forget. . .”
And they’re targeting “those who elected him,” and “those who funded him,” referring, of course, to the President and the 70 million people who voted for him.
One reporter from the Washington Post deemed that everyone archived “should never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position, or be accepted into ‘polite’ society.”
She concluded her thinly-veiled threat by saying, “We have a list.”
Twitter, of course, did not see fit to censor this shining example of objective journalism, which now has 40,000 likes.
It’s a pretty blatant sign of decline when people start keeping ‘lists’ of political opponents they want to punish. And this madness is just getting started.
ultiple anti-Trump activists and commentators are signaling a coming broad-based effort to carry out punishment and retribution against Trump supporters and associates for what the activists claim are the irreparable harms that Trump's political movement has wrought upon the United States.
Major media outlets last week declared Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 election. Donald Trump has in response lodged multiple legal complaints and recount requests in battleground states that Biden is projected to have won by razor-thin margins.
In the meantime, numerous anti-Trump activists have been threatening to ostracize and economically punish individuals who have been associated with Trump's political career since 2016.
Among the more prominent figures avowing such an intent is New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who last week suggested keeping an archive of the internet posts of Trump supporters for some undefined future purpose.
"Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future?" she tweeted. "I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future". In a subsequent tweet she cryptically alluded to holding Trump supporters "responsible for their behavior over [the] last four years."
Shortly after the election, Evan McMullin — a former CIA officer who ran as a spoiler candidate against Trump in 2016 — offered a similar proposition, suggesting that those involved in Trump's legal efforts to investigate and challenge voting irregularities in the 2020 election should be effectively blacklisted.
"We should keep and publish a list of everyone who assists Trump's frivolous and dangerous attacks on the election," he said. "Name and shame forever."
'We have a list'
McMullin's suggestion of a perpetual shaming campaign against Trump supporters was not unique. Jennifer Rubin, a prominent NeverTrump commentator and columnist at the Washington Post, echoed that sentiment on Twitter a few days after the election.
"Any [Republican] now promoting rejection of an election or calling to not to follow the will of voters or making baseless allegations of fraud," she wrote, "should never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position or be accepted into 'polite' society. We have a list."
Rubin herself did not provide an example of that alleged "list." But one newly created group, the Trump Accountability Project, appears to be the most organized effort to date to institute punishments for Trump associates following the presumptive end of Trump's first term in office.
The group, which last week was promoted on Twitter by former Democratic National Committee Press Secretary Hari Sevugan, seeks to stigmatize "those who took a paycheck from the Trump Administration," who the initiative argues "should not profit from their efforts to tear our democracy apart."
Among the individuals the group seeks to target: Trump campaign workers, Republican National Committee staffers, individuals with "affiliated organizations," Trump political appointees, and major Trump donors and bundlers.
Just what the intended retribution will look like is unclear. The Trump Accountability Project did not respond to a query seeking more information on how it intends to promote and encourage the comeuppance of Trump associates. Nor did Rep. Ocasio-Cortez or many of the other individuals who have expressed similar desires.
Among those is former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who said in October that, following the eventual conclusion of the Trump administration, the U.S. should develop a "a Truth and Reconciliation Commission," a political body often established in war-torn countries after major human rights violations have transpired.
Such a commission in the U.S. would "erase Trump's lies, comfort those who have been harmed by his hatefulness, and name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe," Reich said.
Calls for such a commission have been echoed by numerous others, including Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt and former actress Quinn Cummings. Schmidt, a strategist on John McCain's failed 2008 presidential campaign, had particularly pointed things to say about individuals such as attorneys he said were participating in Trump's alleged attacks on American democracy over the last week.
"All of these people are complicit in the assault against American democracy," he said. "None of them should ever be forgiven. All of them should pay a brutal price for betraying the American ideal."
The Lincoln Project itself this week launched a campaign to harass the law firms representing Trump in his election-related lawsuits. The group on Tuesday urged its followers on Twitter to create LinkedIn accounts, message lawyers working for those firms, and "ask them how they can work for an organization trying to overturn the will of the American people."
The group shortly thereafter began retweeting screenshots of messages its followers sent to those firms. The Lincoln Project, a NeverTrump political action committee specializing in negative ads, also strongly implied it would be taking the fight even further than that. One of the group's followers advised them on Twitter to "go after [the firms'] clients. Hit them in the billings."
"Oh, we're on it," the Lincoln Project replied.
