“One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we’ll need a new definition”. - Alvin Toffler

By James Howard Kunstler - January 9, 2023

Insurrections galore spark off all of a sudden and 2023 was just born days ago! Want to know why? Because the business model of the global economy is broken and the supposed remedy for that is centralized control of populations and super-strict regulation of all their activities — that is, techno-tyranny (with Marxist characteristics, as the Chinese like to put it). Not everybody wants to ride that bus, and so an epic economic problem becomes an arduous political struggle, here and elsewhere in the world.

A large number of people went apeshit in Brazil over the weekend in that country’s weird, geographically isolated capital, Brasilia, a horror of 1960s-style Modernist city planning. They stormed the national congress and trashed the offices within to protest the fishy election of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva over the former incumbent Jair Bolsonaro. As in our own country, the quarrel was over the mysterious behavior of voting machines and the unwillingness of election officials or courts to verify the results. The New York Times offered a thumbnail of Mr. Bolsonaro, who is sitting out the current action in Florida:

"The resulting picture showed an elected leader, first as a congressman and then as president, who has built a narrative of fraudulent elections based on inaccuracies, out-of-context reports, circumstantial evidence, conspiracy theories and downright falsehoods — much like former President Donald J. Trump.”

Get it? There’s no way fraud could have happened, just like in our country. And Bolsonaro is another Trump. It explains everything. All complaints are “baseless,” “false,” and “conspiracy theories.” End-of-story…. Are these shopworn tropes maybe losing their mojo? And is The New York Times embarrassing itself, a little bit, to trot them out as if they are actually arguments against anything?

The truth is more that Mr. Lula is another Hugo Chavez, poised to wreck Brazil with a fresh attempt at nationalizing all enterprise, ramping up a Marxist police state, and inviting China in to partner-up in the action, including new Chinese military bases in the western hemisphere — an interesting challenge to the Monroe Doctrine (if anyone remembers what it says). And so, Mr. Lula has arrested hundreds of protesters and declared a national emergency.

Don’t expect it to stop there. The protesters are asking the army to intervene, as Brazil’s constitution actually obligates them to do in election disputes. Also, unlike the USA, Brazil has plenty of prior experience with the army removing elected leaders. Sometimes, electing yourself into tyranny is not the best way to solve economic problems. For the moment, Mr. Lula borrows a page from the American Left’s playbook for destroying a society. It will matter a lot if he doesn’t get away with it. That’s why the US political Swamp, and its errand boys in the news media, look on the action in Brazil with alarm. Unlike the January 6 protest in Washington, the Brasilia mob represents a genuine insurrection aimed at overthrowing a communist seizure of power.

Likewise, the US Swamp endured a rebellion in the House of Representatives last week. The 20-odd reps who revolted against Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker — Matt Gates, Lauren Boebert, and others — sought written guarantees to prevent such legislative insults as the passage of a 4000-page omnibus spending bill that nobody could possibly read prior to voting, along with many Swamp-draining changes in rules. One rule change makes it much easier to remove Speaker McCarthy from leadership if he reneges on any of his agreements. The House can now proceed to multiple inquiries into the vast matrix of rot, malice, and deceit that has set the federal government at war against its own citizens.

One angle of this, of course, is the open border with Mexico that has enabled millions of unvetted migrants to enter the USA, illegally with the federal immigration apparatus recruited (also illegally) to disperse them all over the country. “Joe Biden” traveled down to the border last weekend in a pretend show of concern for the disorder the people behind him have instigated there. They stupidly took him for a photo op to one of the few places on the border where he wouldn’t have to actually witness mobs crossing the Rio Grande: a stretch of wall that his predecessor, Mr. Trump, built. Hey, no unsightly foreign riffraff cluttering up the picture there!

Before long, the House is going to impeach Mr. Biden over this and quite a few other matters. He may not be . . .

[SNIP]