The Big Smoke (and Mirrors)

So, I’m going to be in London on March 25, talking about the New Normal Reich, and the entity I’ve been calling “GloboCap,” so I’m trying to organize my thoughts a bit in order to not make a total ass of myself in front of a bunch of British people. I figured I would reach out to my readers for feedback, as many of you appear to enjoy giving me feedback, most of which I read and appreciate. So, that’s what I am going to do in this newsletter.

First, let me tell you about the event.

The event is one of those all-day conferences, with panels and breakout groups and all that. It’s hosted by a group called Real Left, formerly Left Lockdown Sceptics. They’re calling it “The Left Case Against the World Economic Forum.” I’m on a panel with Dr. Fabio Vighi, Professor of Critical Theory and Italian at Cardiff University. It’s just the two of us. We’re the panel. We probably won’t be talking about the WEF very much, or not specifically about the WEF. We’ll mostly be talking about global capitalism, which is what I want your feedback on.

The other speakers on the other panels are:

Cory Morningstar, an independent investigative journalist, writer and environmental activist. You probably know her work from Wrong Kind of Green.

Paul Cudenec, an anarchist writer in the organic radical tradition who runs an outfit called Winter Oak.

Piers Corbyn, physicist, meteorologist, activist, notorious UK “thoughtcriminal”, and Jeremy’s brother.

Vikki Spit, the first person to receive compensation for the loss of a loved one (i.e., her fiancée) killed by one of the “Covid vaccines” from the UK Vaccine Damages Payment Scheme.

And some other folks. The line-up is still being finalized. The details are here on the Real Left website. There aren’t any names or any biographical information on the site, so I assume Real Left is some sort of nefarious “Covid-denying, conspiracy-theorizing, Putin-loving, democracy-threatening, far-right, anti-vax” leftist outfit that is plotting to storm the House of Commons, or Buckingham Palace, or whatever it is one storms in the United Kingdom.

I’m looking forward to speaking on the panel, and to taking questions afterwards, and to generally meeting and talking to people face-to-face. I turned into a bit of a talking head on the Internet over the last three years, which I thought was important to do at the time but is not something I’m generally inclined to. I’m particularly disinclined to it at the moment. I don’t know about you, but I am feeling somewhat overwhelmed by talking heads, and posts, and tweets, and podcasts, and people bellowing at me at the top of their lungs about the latest detail of whatever ongoing outrage I’m supposed to be all worked up about, and all the limited hangouts, and memory-holing, and smoke- and-mirrors and dog-and-pony shows being desperately presented by people from all quarters. Not that there is any shortage of outrages to be all worked up about. It’s just that we are in one of those phases where we are being barraged with so much random online messaging (and, let’s face it, bullshit) that people can’t even think anymore, and are “distracted from distraction by distraction,” as one old British banker once put it, so it will be nice to get a little break from all that.

OK, here’s what I want your feedback on. What I want to do in London is tell a story. The same story I’ve been telling for the last six years. I want to tell it as simply and as clearly as I can. So, I’m going to outline the main plot points below, and what I would like to know is (a) can you follow it, and (b) what am I totally wrong about, and why?

Instead of rewording the whole story again, I’m going to just paste in an excerpt from an interview I did with Matt Taibbi, back in May of 2021, when his Substack was still called “TK News,” and then I’ll add a few more thoughts at the end.

TK: You were one of the first people to express skepticism about Russiagate. Do you see a connection between that story and this one [i.e., the New Normal]?

Hopkins: Absolutely, same operation, different narrative. OK, I'll try to boil all this down as much as I can, so bear with me. We have to go back to 2016 ...

So, there global capitalism was, happily destabilizing, restructuring, privatizing, and debt-enslaving the entire planet, and cleaning up little pockets of resistance to global capitalist ideology, as it had been doing since the fall of the USSR, which is when global capitalism became the first unopposed globally-hegemonic ideological system in history. The War on Terror was still the primary official narrative. Then Brexit, Trump, and the whole populist backlash against globalization and wokeness that erupted in 2016. So global capitalism (or “GloboCap,” as I’ve taken to calling it) needed to adjust the official narrative to delegitimize Trump, who was (a) an unauthorized president and (b) a symbol of that populist backlash, basically, a big “fuck you” to the global capitalist establishment from the American people.

OK, GloboCap spends the next four years demonizing Trump as both a Russian intelligence asset and literally the Resurrection of Adolf Hitler, and everyone who voted for him (or who refused to vote for Clinton) as “fascists,” or “white-supremacist extremists,” or just “racists.” Russiagate fell apart in the Spring of 2019, but by that time GloboCap had already shifted to Hitlergate, and was whipping up mass hysteria over “literal fascism” and the coming frontal “attack on democracy” (and presumably the US military) that was going to be carried out by Trump's underground militia of Alex-Jones-watching “white supremacists,” or whatever.

But Russiagate/Hitlergate was never about Trump, who was never a threat to GloboCap, and was always just a narcissistic ass clown. It was about reminding us who’s running things, and what happens if we start rebelling against the hegemony of global capitalism and electing unauthorized ass-clown presidents instead of the corporate puppets GloboCap has carefully vetted and presented to us to obediently vote for. What happens is, they make an example of the ass-clown president and demonize everyone who voted for him as “traitors” and “racists.” The narrative culminated in 2020 with the BLM protests/riots, the “Storming of the Capitol,” etc. Russian Hitler was vanquished. “Democracy” triumphed. So now it was time to “restore normality” ... or, rather, “New Normality.”

Essentially, what the last 4-5 years have been about is crushing resistance to GloboCap’s hegemony and ideology throughout the West, as it crushed resistance to its hegemony and ideology in the Middle East during the War on Terror. What better way to crush a populist rebellion and remind us who is really in charge than to foment mass hysteria over a clearly non-apocalyptic virus, impose a bunch of unnecessary, totalitarian “emergency measures,” cancel our constitutional rights, censor and/or demonize dissent, and otherwise transform societies into pathologized-totalitarian police states?

The extreme totalitarian phase won’t last (we're already shifting into Phase 2), but the “New Normal” is here to stay, or that’s the plan anyway. Which is not a surprise, or it shouldn’t be. GloboCap announced the transition to the “New Normal” very clearly, right at the outset, in March/April 2020, when they were still showing us fake photos of Chinese people dropping dead in the street, projecting a horrific 3.4% death rate (i.e., hundreds of millions of deaths), and otherwise carrying out the initial “Shock and Awe” phase.

OK, before somebody calls me a “conspiracy theorist,” GloboCap is not a bunch of guys in a room conspiring to do all this. Global capitalism is a system. Systems function according to their own structures and logic. What I'm talking about is not individual people conspiring (although individual people certainly do, and that is part of it). I'm talking about the logical evolution of a global-hegemonic ideological system, i.e., a system without external enemies, which has nothing left to do but consolidate power and eliminate internal resistance. If you understand the last 5-6 years (actually the last 30 years) that way, as I do, this shift to a less democratic, more ideologically monolithic, more totalitarian social structure (i.e., the “New Normal”) is not at all surprising. On the contrary, it is the next logical step.

So, there’s the story, or the broad strokes, anyway. It’s the story of the evolution of the first globally-hegemonic power system in history, which is emerging out of the dying (or dead, or zombified) Fordist global-capitalist system like a metamorphosing insect in the pupal stage.

What I hope I have time to talk about in London is the resistance to the New Normal, and GloboCap, or whatever anyone needs to call it (I am aware that some of my more conservative readers get very upset when I call it “global capitalism”), the majority of which resistance is coming from the political right and is classically reactionary. I do not mean “reactionary” in a pejorative sense. It is meant to describe the social forces that are resisting — and “resistance” is the key word here — the implementation and enforcement of global-capitalist ideology, which I have repeatedly described as a new form of Gleichschaltung. A lot of people on the political right refer to what I’m calling “global-capitalist ideology” as “Wokism,” or “cultural Marxism,” or whatever. I’m not interested in arguing about labels. I’m interested in understanding what’s happening, and trying to articulate and respond to what is happening, before we end up debating Capitalism versus Marxism in the “conspiracy theorist quarantine camps” (which, the way things are going, might be our own neighborhoods).

The main reason I decided to travel to London and speak at this conference is that it is organized by “the Left,” and I think we all know what a mess “the Left” is, or most of “the Left,” in any event. I’m putting “the Left” in scare quotes because it isn’t “the Left” I came from, or identify with, or recognize. What most people think of and call “the Left” nowadays is an amalgamation of social forces that are completely aligned with global capitalism, and its ideology, and its global Gleichschaltung campaign, and its counterinsurgency operations against the above-mentioned reactionary backlash, which is why it is in the sorry state it is in (or, arguably, no longer exists).

All right, that’s a huge can of worms, and this newsletter is already way too long, and I’ll be writing more about it in the future, and discussing it in London, hopefully, so I will restrain myself, and wrap this up.

Feel free to let me know your thoughts and share your criticism in the below replies. And, if you happen to be in London or the vicinity, I hope to see you at the Real Left conference, or sauntering about the House of Commons wearing the British version of a bison hat.