Happy Despot's Day

Hate is having its moment

Happy President's Day — or do we now say: Happy Despot's Day?

Today in MindWar, Jim Stewart unpacks the overt symbolism in the treacly cute, cartoon image Musk chose for DOGE. Unfortunately, Musk is directly referencing Nazi iconography along with well-known White Supremacist sayings. Many people still refuse to believe that Musk intentionally made two Nazi salutes "from the heart." Perhaps a look at Stewart's article will help convince them that Musk is in fact — yes, really! — a fucking Nazi who is overtly, repeatedly telegraphing that, much like Kanye West or "Ye" (who Musk hypocritically banned from X) with his Swastika t-shirt.

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you.

- Sylvia Plath

I remember reading Jim Marrs' The Rise of the Fourth Reich years ago, and found it interesting but a bit extreme. Marrs proposed that Germany had been defeated in World War Two, but Nazism as an ideology had not been defeated. He proposed it mutated secretly, finding a new home in the US. Marrs tracked this through secret societies like Yale's Skull and Bones, which is linked to the Bavarian Illuminati under Adam Weishaupt. Famously, with Operation Paperclip, the US Government brought 1,200 Nazi scientists to the US, including Wernher von Braun, the Nazi's leading rocket scientist and ardent Nazi, who became a pioneer of America's space program and part of the early years of NASA.

Today, what Marrs described as a hidden movement has emerged into plain view. As I have mentioned in previous articles, I always intuited there was a Fascist undertone to American society, and its social/political ideology. Obviously current events have pushed this into everyone's faces: We are now forced to confront it directly.

Werner Von Braun with various phallic prostheses

There are very severe problems with Fascism as an ideology — one is that it is based in hate instead of love, and built on control and "power over" rather than shared power and solidarity. It doesn't take more than a quick look at Trump and Musk's faces to realize these are severely damaged human beings who try to foist their unintegrated trauma and pain on everybody else rather than deal with it. Similarly with the collection of narcissists and psychopaths they have surrounded themselves with, such as Russel Vought, an extreme Christian Nationalist, now Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

That look.

Vought is a prime example of this mindset. Now Director of the Office of Management and Budget, he has declared: "We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma." Many government workers are people who could have taken higher paying jobs in industry but chose, instead, to serve the public good.

My new online seminar on Rudolf Steiner, “You Say You Want a Revelation?”, starts next Saturday. Info is here.

If someone is so excited about inflicting trauma on people who committed no harm against them, it can only be the result of deep inner wounding that they refuse to confront. I admit I still find it amazing that Christian Nationalists like Vought are able to believe that their yearning to cause pain and damage on others bears any relationship to Christ's message in The Gospels. Love your neighbor and so on. I mean, I realize we are in the Apocalypse, and this is part of the Anti-Christ / Great Beast total perversion of all authentic values and meaning that we were warned about. Still, it is crazy to see it playing out so overtly.

I keep thinking about our crisis through the lens of Robert Falconer's The Others Within Us, on Internal Family Systems and sub-personalities which he equates with spirits and spirit possession as known to indigenous and shamanic cultures around the world. Our society had, after a few centuries of struggle, just managed to push many of the "bad parts" — the racist, sexist, shameful, twisted elements — of the human Psyche down into the cellar, where they could no longer be expressed openly. The annoying, scolding “woke” culture Superego had won a temporary restraining order against our seething, enraged, un-PC Id. We were being forced to confront guilt over what we, as Westerners, had perpetrated on other peoples, genders, and cultures across the planet as a result of our rapacious quest for global dominance. It is painful to experience guilt and shame, and easier to push it away or — better! — blame others for the bad, bitter feelings.

Trump gave permission for all of those "bad parts" to come rushing back up into consciousness. This has occurred with a kind of volcanic, eruptive energy that accumulated as a result of the repression and suppression of these negative aspects of the Psyche, plus the guilt and shame that people do not want to address or feel. Particularly, white men didn’t like being made to feel guilty or ashamed about their unearned power and privilege, which often came at the expense of subjugated peoples.

Even with all of that, I still find it difficult to completely explain how our society turned out to be such fertile ground for this sudden eruption of everything repressed and hateful. I mean, I agree Woke was annoying as fuck, and DEI had gone overboard, but isn’t literal Nazism and White Supremacy just a bit too far of a pendulum swing in the other direction? But hey, that’s just me.