We’re seeing something happening.

All these wealthy and powerful people who snubbed Trump now flock to him to talk. Class is now on full display as even those who disdained him now flock to be courtiers in his court. Capitalist diversity initiatives designed to paper over the exploitation of the system with carefully tested language and a few hiring preferences are being tossed out. The long, decades-old corporate push in this direction has been discarded.

This is a sea-change and a departure from the collective shrug of the powerful to his first election years ago.

The question is are they visiting Trump to kiss his ring? Or are they visiting him to make him kiss theirs and telling him what the plan is now that they’re onboard with the reactionary side of the culture war and are shifting messaging and strategies a bit?

The Democrat-led but empire supported push for cracking down on “disinformation” and “misinformation” which targeted domestic problematic elements outside the grip of mainstream media as well as enemies of empire is being rolled back and in its place I think we have increasingly naked jingoistic power politics. No longer do they hide behind and clutch the supposed liberal values which they’ve so long used to push the agenda.

Now it’s no longer talk of combatting disinfo but I think of just directly fighting Russia and China. The supreme court ruling on Tiktok shows they’re open to just admitting that they don’t think the values they’ve long said others need to embrace apply such as free speech are something they need to hide and conceal their motives behind. It’s not working much more, their hypocrisy is laid bare with Ukraine, with Gaza, etc. So now it becomes discarded in favor of the same national security excuses for censorship that they’ve long derided China and Russia and other nations for as being undemocratic for exercising.

It I think illustrates the great possibility we do see greater pushes of control, greater censorship, breaking of encryption, roll-backs of rights granted during the good times such as the first amendment and those of privacy. The boot in other words coming down.

It also gives me pause. Though I largely think liberals are histrionic when it comes to claiming Trump is going to suspend elections and seize power, I admit all these moves have me questioning whether there isn’t a small chance that the bourgeoisie and empire would at this junction be fine with a suspension of the institutions and norms in order to carry out crack-downs and to solidify their grasp on power as an empire, to prepare for the well underway cold war with China/Russia. It would give them a certain plausible deniability to carry out unpopular work and then discard certain people should they need to fall back on liberal ideals in a few years after doing most of the dirty work. I’m not saying given his age he’ll necessarily last beyond his 4-year mandate, I am saying he might be allowed to wield power in ways that most would assume is proscribed by the institutions of US liberal capitalist ‘democracy’.

At the very least we can say that reaction seems ascendant and there is a growing danger for the working class, for minorities, for women as all pretenses of capitalism adopted after the fall of the USSR are being discarded and if you want to war with China, if you want to win a cold war you need to ramp up the reaction at home. This goes beyond Trump’s last win or a bunch of petite boug shit-heads getting together with some tea because a black guy won. This I think represents a real, and possibly enduring shift in domestic politics and perhaps international strategy to match though on that we’ll have to wait and see.

This along with pushes for re-arming, for increasing “defense” spending and cutting welfare and embracing wackos like RFK jr (whose deranged ideas for the mentally ill and neurodivergent are just a new age coat of paint on old protestant ‘tough-it-out’ slave mentality work ethics and an excuse to bring back workhouses for cheap domestic manufacturing off the backs of the incarcerated, the differently abled, etc) the truncheon is out, the steel-tipped boots are ready to step on necks. We enter interesting and dangerous times.