The Assassination of Julius Caesar: Botched
The Road to Hell
Insightful as always, Matt Taibbi, in his commentary on the recent assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump, reminds us of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, in which the conspirators, following Caesar’s demise, could not comprehend why everyone wasn’t giddy with the autocrat’s removal: Dumbfounded, they could not fathom where they had gone wrong.
This is a perfect jumping-off point for today’s post, and I’ll try and steer us away from tempting distractions that pop up like exit signs on the media’s Trumptopia turnpike, focusing instead on facts. Hopefully, I’ll be able to fish for something a bit more nutritious than the slop we get every day from The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and the State Department’s Stenography Corps, otherwise known as CNN. These are nothing more than contemporary avatars for Cassius, Decius, Brutus, and Casca.
If you’d like to look more deeply at the parallels between the politics of antiquity and the 21st century, I strongly suggest checking out Michael Parenti’s Assassination of Julius Caesar. In any case, it’s now our legacy media pimps who are scratching their heads, wondering where it all went wrong, thoroughly out of touch with the populace that they are meant to proselytize and convert with their sermons about inclusion.
They do all of this while claiming to spread democracy via warfare and genocide, standing proudly behind their fearless leader, a senile grifter and pathological liar.
David Frum, a right-wing toady and former speechwriter for George W, has been reincarnated as a Never-Trumper and is responsible for much of the hysteria surrounding the former loudmouth-in-chief. He supported the utter subversion of federal law and all of the bogus show trials, and he propagated the whole “Trump is Putin’s Puppet” business, pushing everything from Manchurian Candidate fairy tales to anecdotes about prostitutes and pee-pee tapes. This hack was a chief fabulist in the vanguard of the bogus Trump resistance, someone posturing as a principled, but tough customer who decided to don a pink pussy cap in solidarity with the likes of warmongering HRC. In a lame rant from The Atlantic aimed at demonizing NRA culture — written with little to no concern for factuality or common sense — he goes so far as to blame the attempt on Trump himself, along with his posse of hardcore MAGA acolytes, of course.
It’s important to pay attention to people like Frum and how they write. They hold sway over millions of liberal PMC types, who as Chris Hayes describes in Twilight of the Elites, sit smugly and parrot the opinions of their friends and the people in their social circles, never questioning their allegiance to the Democrats as long as their portfolios don’t take a hit. Look at the above-mentioned piece, and carefully read the paragraph listing the administration’s meager accomplishments, including a claim that the birth rate is rising. Even that isn’t factual: the birth rate has dropped .12% since 2023. The only matter of substance came when he praised an allegedly robust economy, the only claim in the paragraph for which he didn’t provide a source.
But hell will freeze over — and Trump will be reelected — before a single liberal ever admits that their party has sold out to the forces of Capital and the weapons industry and has engaged in a decade’s worth of obfuscation, lying, and criminality in its attempt to frame the former president as the world’s most notorious figure since Caligula.
That’s all they had after Hillary lost the presidency to the host of a reality TV show.
Still, people died during the shooting, and the liberal establishment, its media, and the criminals who work in Washington — those who protect a class of wealth hoarders, weapons manufacturers, and a dangerously deranged president — are to blame. Our political apathy, our willingness to remain uneducated, and our trust in two parties that are thoroughly captured and rotten to the core have all led to this: we have now imbued Donald J Trump with the stuff that legends are made of.
And we are looking to pass the buck, eager to be absolved of the guilt, which stems from the fact that we’ve all let this happen.
We permit it to happen every time we:
· Let someone propagate conspiracy theories like Russiagate and offer no pushback.
· Let someone like Genocide Joe appoint a neocon like Victoria Nuland — Robert Kagan’s wife for chrissakes — to run our foreign policy.
· Let FOX, CNN, and MSNBC spew lies and never hold them to account for tragedies like the false flag in Douma that led to untold bloodshed in Syria. (See Aaron Mate at the UN)
· Let our representatives continue to spout nonsense and support horrible policies without ever writing to them in protest or getting out in the streets.
· Let ourselves be convinced of something as dangerous and harebrained as “voting for the lesser of two evils.”
· Let ourselves remain the most politically uneducated and propagandized citizenry in the developed Western world.
· Let people tell us that Donald Trump is the most pressing concern when we have a president who, for the first time since we annihilated our Indigenous peoples, is openly and enthusiastically supporting the most notorious genocide of the last quarter century.
Early in his career, François Mitterrand, a brilliant politician and first-rate bullshitter, paid someone to mount a fake assassination attempt against him. It was an extremely effective PR move for the man who finally ended up as President of the French Republic. People who survive assassination attempts, like Ronald Reagan, have an almost mythologically powerful status bestowed upon them.
Now, because of all the lies, all the hysteria, all of the propaganda, all of the duplicity from the Biden press secretaries, all of the dangerous bullshit from people like Rachel Maddow and Keith Olberman — regurgitated daily — thanks to that, we are left with this:
President Donald J Trump, 2024: Encore Performance.
We let this happen because we trusted crooked institutions and a liberal class utterly devoid of compassion, virtue, and the core principles of traditional Enlightenment liberalism. Donald Trump is a crude demagogue, but what he really represented was this: a danger from outside the Beltway that threatened to upend the complex machinery that ensures global military hegemony and economic domination. He was hesitant when it came to Ukraine. While Hillary and her lawyer Michael Sussman were cooking up that Russiagate nonsense that got her campaign fined and Sussman indicted, Trump was actually giving Putin a very tough time. He was, truth be told, tougher than previous administrations with sanctions and warnings against Russian aggression.
This is where lies and good intentions have always led, and it is not a cliché. We have driven ourselves straight to hell thanks to our refusal to get educated or become engaged. We parrot the political ideas of whichever social class we belong to and as long as we can pay for our streaming services and buy a pair of cargo pants at Target for 20 bucks, what’s to worry about?
Right?