Sowing Chaos is the plan

On most days, I scan the news landscape by opening two dozen sites, including The Associated Press, The Washington Post, New York Times, Houston Public Media and Google News.

Today I noticed a pattern of content having to do with Trump’s cabinet and other leadership roles in his upcoming administration. Most of the pundits focused on how poor these choices are. Some are in over their heads, others know nothing about that which they will supervise and so on. What these choices have in common, these BigMedia talking heads assert, is their loyalty to Trump. Therefore, they will sow chaos, as will Trump, across the entire federal government.

While all all of these lamentations are partly true, they miss the bigger picture. These proposed appointees aren’t really Trump’s picks. He doesn’t know enough about the government to make those picks. They are are chosen by the operatives of the billionaire plutocrats and oligarchs behind the the dismantling of our democracy. And, yes, they will cause chaos, but that’s only a tactic. The real strategy is to destroy government. As Dr. Nancy MacLean points out in “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America,” Charles Koch and his allies — a cast of thousands — want to tear government out at its roots.

Remember, this is a long-term game. At its heart, this is the epitome of white privilege and racism that caused a civil war in the Nineteenth Century. Those feelings didn’t go away. They just flew below the radar. But they were energized by Brown v Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that separate education wasn’t equal. This is at the core of the right-wing radical movement. Immediately after the ruling, the so-called segregation academies popped up as private schools for whites only. ProPublica’s series (https://www.propublica.org/series/segregation-academies) traces this movement. But that was just the start. Voucher plans to destroy public education are operationally no different now from the ones 70 years ago.

And topics that raise ire and are “hot button” reactions like abortion, contraception, union busting, crime, immigration, LBGTQ rights fossil fuels and climate change are the wedge issues designed to divide people and sow chaos. That’s why we’ve been subjected to them. Even worse, they’ve been normalized as the right-wing American Enterprise Institute’s Jonah Goldberg points out, “But now it seems the odor has dissipated, at least among political scientists and operatives. Sure, there are still some ugly wedges, but wedge issues as a generic category or tool are now recognized for what they always were: normal politics.”

The truth is that most of the right-wing, at least the secular part, really doesn’t care about the cultural issues like abortion and gay rights. But they rile up the crowds, don’t they?

So, the chaos, you see, has been a tactic all along; and, so has disinformation, which has been turning definitions on their head. Tyler Cowen, the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University, Koch-funded intellectual mothership of the radical-right movement, wrote, “the freest countries [defining freedom as economic liberty] have not generally been democratic.” MacLean quotes Cowen in “How the Koch Network Uses Disinformation,” Chapter 5 in “The Disinformation Age: Politics, Technology, and Disruptive Communication in the United States.”

MacLean continues by writing that her research “adds to our understanding is its exposure of the core ideas guiding these efforts and how those ideas, in turn, explain the reliance on radical rules change (including change to the Constitution) being secured without alerting the public to the real endgame.”

Read that again. It’s began long ago with stacking the judiciary with Federalist Society judges, overturning Roe v Wade, gerrymandering, voter suppression and eliminating voting sites. But these were for two reasons: to undermine the voice of the people and to distract from the long view. This stealth project wants to change the Constitution to lock down the unfettered economic power of the ruling class. The next step is a Convention of the States, under Article V of the current U.S. Constitution. I am not going to dwell on this, but I urge you to look at: https://conventionofstates.com/

It really doesn’t matter whether the Trump appointee is incompetent. The pandemonium is the plan and the rhetoric will ramp up calling for the dismantling of whatever the government activity is. That will open the door for shutting it down. Then think about what’s left when the government has only two functions: law enforcement and national defense. Posse Comitatus be damned.