2020 Year In Review and Projections
Capitol Aftermath, and Where Things Go From Here
Welcome to the Contextual Insurgent Project by writer, analyst, and activist Erin Smith.
This is your Contextual Insurgent weekly roundup, where I link you to a selection of the previous week’s previous notable events/articles/tweets and contextualize them with a short analysis drawn from a synthesis of hands-on experience and theoretical knowledge.
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First off, a hearty welcome and thanks to all the new subscribers! I was already impressed with how quickly my subscriber base was growing, but in the wake of the Capitol Uprising -and subsequent mass banning/deplatforming of right-leaning voices- the reach of this newsletter has absolutely exploded:
I’ve also created a Contextual Insurgent Telegram Channel to share and discuss content, I would love for you to come join us! BTW here’s a way(LINK) to sign up for Telegram without using your actual phone number if your PERSEC requires it.
I’m also downloading my email list every day for the foreseeable future, so if (God forbid) I wind up deplatformed I’ll be able to recover and contact you. I also have a few other projects in the works, I’ll pass on more details when the time is right.
I originally intended to send the review/projections email last Wednesday, but then the Capitol dealio happened while I was finishing up and…well, I figured I should probably wait a few days and let trendlines develop first. These types of incidents have an uncanny way of becoming inflection points, and I’d feel bad if I shot an email into your inbox filled with already laughably wrong predictions.
Things are still a bit wacky, but I definitely see enough patterns emerging from the fog now that I feel I can at least hit on some important themes.
This newsletter will be split into five parts:
2020 in review
2021 so far (heavily focused on the Capitol Incident and background)
Domestic Implications
International Implications
Action Items for You
Looking Back on 2020
“There is a lot of ruin in a nation.” -Adam Smith
Revolutionary conditions indeed.
I won’t list everything of note that happened in 2020 -given that we all were there for that annus horribilis- but what I will do is list what I believe are the most important lessons and notable events and trends.
Global Pandemic - The year started with SARS CoV-2 exploding out of China (with circumstantial evidence increasingly pointing towards a potential leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology) and burning across an increasingly globalized world, bringing trade and travel to a shuddering halt -but not soon enough. Kneejerk rejection of anything that reeked of nativism and xenophobia kept many western borders open too long and delayed the implementation of countermeasures, ensuring the virus was already widespread by the time it was finally taken seriously.
Collapse of state capacity and social trust -the virus put organizations and institutions to the test, with many of them failing badly. The media initially sneered at early warnings before belatedly flipping into hysteria mode. Federal and state governments that failed to act in a timely manner overreacted with draconian lockdowns that destroyed the economy, while antiquated unemployment systems crashed under the load of millions of new applicants. Officials were caught in multiple lies and contradictions while agencies delayed the rollout of reliable tests. Tech companies clamped down on dissenters, as well as anyone that raised questions about the nature of the disease and the various models built to help guide planning.
The economic fallout meant millions fell behind on bills such as rent and mortgages, and leftist groups didn’t pass up the opportunity to organize tenants’ unions and eviction defense groups. Homeless advocacy groups helped their charges squat in vacant homes and occupy motel rooms, and eviction defense actions in the latter part of the year involved violent confrontations with police and elaborate barricades.
The economic destruction was concentrated primarily in the tangible economy, ruining small businesses and the working class while leaving information workers -the Zoom class- mostly unscathed This further inflamed tensions and increased polarization in the election as the latter broke hard for the Democrats, while the former shifted towards Republicans. Trillions of dollars in wealth also shifted from the middle class to transnational corporations
The most destructive riots in American history kicked off in late May, ostensibly over police brutality against blacks. Anyone that defended themselves against the rioters was targeted for political prosecution and social/economic penalties. Billions of dollars were donated to BLM and related activist organizations, and antifa groups spent months clashing with riot cops while improving their equipment, operational sophistication, and TTPs. Multiple police stations were overrun and burned, the White House was besieged, and Portland’s federal courthouse was attacked nightly for weeks. When President Trump indicated he was considering invoking the Insurrection Act to quell the riots, he faced public insubordination and a near-coup from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (Oh, and I cowrote a book on antifa).
Cities became much less popular places to be, as the WFH revolution and exploding crime (a result of the Floyd riots and collapsing state capacity) destroyed overheated coastal blue state housing markets.
A brutally contested election left everyone unsatisfied to some extent. The polls were dramatically off and the legislature ended up under razor-thin Dem control with a Democratic President, while Republicans expanded their dominant control of state legislatures in a redistricting year. Two major points of contention during the election were debates around the legality of changing voting procedures and security of mail-in voting during a pandemic, and dramatic interference from social media companies in the flow of information during the final stretch -culminating in Facebook and Twitter blocking a damning corruption story from the NY Post, involving a candidate’s son acting as a cut-out for his father and accepting bribes from foreign nations. The presidency ended up being decided by 40,000 votes, which combined with some of the rhetoric from opposition party figures and the aforementioned collapse in social trust meant a majority of Republicans refused to accept the results as legitimate. To be fair, both sides had indicated they wouldn’t accept the results if they went against their candidate.
The election results hint that an end to the sixth party system is finally upon us, with the Democratic party becoming the party of urban information workers and the corporate/financial class, with the Republicans becoming the tangible economy party.
Wokeness finished conquering the USA -a malignant orthodoxy of thought enveloped the economic and cultural levers of power, narrowing the window of acceptable expression and enforced via digital and economic defenestration of heretics.
The most important takeaway from 2020 is that aside from SARS-2, none of this was new; all of these things pre-existed the introduction of the novel coronavirus, the pandemic was just a catalyst that accelerated trends and catapulted us 10 years in the future. The silver lining of this is that it is arguably waaay to fast for acclimatization to work, which leaves sensible people in the position of being forced to acknowledge so much of modern culture is -to borrow the argot of Extremely Online Dissident politics- ‘fake and gay.’ The only question is, how to respond?
If you want a vision of their ideal future, imagine an endless psyop with astroturfed, uncanny-valley teen goblins smirking at you through the glowing screens of electronic devices (produced via Uyghur slave labor for the astroturfing globocorps, natch) while they lecture you about Colonialism, Carbon offsets, and Critical Race Theory.
2021: 1/6 Stop The Steal Protest and Capitol Incident
Where to start? well, irregularities and changes in voting procedures combined with a narrow result (~40,000 votes would have been enough to change the result in the electoral college) and all the factors I listed above, meant Republicans ended up the ones feeling robbed. As I explained in a previous newsletter there are legitimate issues about the way we hold our elections and valid criticism about how 2020 went down, but those were quickly drowned out by fever dreams about raids on German server farms and Chinese troops in New England bunkers.
Right wing grifters swooped into action and founded the ‘Stop The Steal’ movement while conservatives (smarting from censorship and deplatforming pushes) decamped from mainstream social media to dogshit twitter clones ran by incompetent clowns.
There were some early indications that the detente between right wing demonstrators and police was fraying, but storming the Capitol still ended up being a rather shocking escalation. There is some debate about the timeline as well as indications of left-wing agitators being present, (another link) but it’s fairly clear that most of the people involved were indeed Trump supporters, and polls showed that the incursion was much more positively regarded by the MAGA base than others.
The entire thing might now have gone so badly had there not been five deaths, but unfortunately there was. The networked pushback was swift : POTUS and many right wing figures were purged from the internet and disconnected from the economy, multiple sites and platforms popular amongst right wingers were attacked and even completely taken offline, mass federal criminal investigations and talk of domestic terrorism statutes being created or applied, and a general atmosphere of alarming eliminationist rhetoric targeting red state Americans ensued from the Acela corridor chattering class.
Ultimately, 1/6 went to shit because righties aren’t organized or trained for mass action and don’t know what the hell they’re doing.
Domestic implications
The problem with predictions is unknown unknowns. If you had been asked in April 2015 to predict the state of the the world in April 2020, you would have been hilariously wrong because you would have had no way of predicting either SARS-2 or President Donald Trump; without either, the world is a much different place. However, we can still talk trendlines and probabilities.
For starters, the Military/Industrial/Tech/Intelligence complex completely dropped the mask and gave it everything they had in order to shoehorn a tapioca-brains candidate into the White House, and they still barely succeeded. Now everyone that was paying the slightest attention seems to be completely aware of the true nature of things. This sort of high-risk, in-your-face strategy also betrays a perception of dissipating power, because ideally a rational actor chooses to reduce exposure by acting via more subtle means.
Of course some have argued that it’s really establishment flexing power, but if so then why have elections at all? Especially when it appears the course of action is already having international blowback (covered in the relevant section below).
The political and pundit class is now talking about harsh prosecutions and cointerinsurgency at home, it’s difficult to see how that choice brings unity given that (a) that strategy has failed overseas; (b) suppressing 48% of the electorate in the most heavily armed nation on Earth seems…probably impossible and most definitely unwise, especially when redistricting means they’re heavily favored to take control of the House of Representatives in the next election.
The secret to understanding all of this is simple: the Capitol incursion was even more humiliating for the establishment than Trump’s 2016 election, and for essentially the same reason: it was a blindside blow to their fundamental sense of security and identity, from the very people they wrote off as the detritus of history. It’s really difficult to express how on-the-nose a pelt-clad barbarian summiting the dais of OUR SACRED DEMOCRACY(hint: ‘our’ translates to ‘not yours’) is to their darkest technocratic fears, that maybe the arc of history doesn’t quite bend so inexorably their way. They didn’t forget 2016, and they’re especially not going to forget this.
To understand these people and what happened(and why it’s going to happen again), you have to understand a simple formula: in a society of plenty, status games are paramount; in a post-industrial information economy, status goes to those best able to manipulate abstractions; the more focus on optimizing for manipulating abstractions, means the highest-status (and most influential) individuals often have difficulty modeling tangible reality. They convince themselves certain things are not possible, then have no realistic way to respond (other than rage) when those very things prove inevitable. This is where they’re weak, remember that.
Right-of-Center dissidents will move to peripheral social platforms(some may even prove viable in the long run) and do more IRL meetups and networking, while the Woke witch hunt intensifies.
Antifa will shift somewhat towards mass tactics, occupation, barricades, and defensive formations and increase their use of doxing and research to expose wrongthinkers to the social media Eye of Sauron, feeding their victims to the networked tyranny of economic and social oppression.
Before you get too depressed, let me finish this section by presenting you with a simple question: have any of the underlying forces that drove first the rise of the TEA Party, then the MAGA movement, been fixed or even addressed? No? Then we’re not done here, not by a long shot.
International Implications
The United States is a nation marked by Informational and Financial hegemony, and the dominant trend of the 2020s will be the dissolution of this system.
Wokeness is a virus that has infected a global memetic empire, and after coordinated tech bans of the American president, nations are belatedly realizing the threat to national sovereignty this entails. Expect moves towards a decentralized/nationalized internet, as countries begin to wall themselves off from infection. The most likely candidate for first mover in this space is India, due to significant user base (1.3 billion people) plus technical crossover with Silicon Valley allowing rapid talent flow.
On the financial side, China has made moves against the Magnitsky act, indicating their analysis of the current balance of power.
On the military side the United States has not successfully designed and built a clean-sheet warship design in 20 years, it appears unlikely this will change any time soon. China is perfecting its ability to use anti-ship ballistic missiles in coordinated attacks, this does not bode well for future power projection.
Action Items For You
Sign up for my Telegram Channel
Download and use encrypted chat apps, such as Signal
Have one person sign up for this newsletter
Start a daily journal, preferably in a notebook. you’ll want to record what happens for future generations, preferably in a non-digital format
Find faith. I’m not trying to evangelize you, merely observing that -when done right- it’s a valid tactic to inoculate yourself against Wokeness. I personally am pantomiming traditional Catholicism, I may not be very good at it but at least it’s a Lindy form of Christianity
Build your local network/affinity group. We have to start building robust local community again, that means finding 3-5 ideologically compatible people you trust. APC is a great place to start
Don’t hide your beliefs, but don’t fedpost either
Follow the guides linked above and think about what you can do locally to start. We’re not going to build something national overnight nor are we going to win this in one climactic battle, but we’re going to win regardless. Trust me, this is going to be fun, and if I haven’t lost faith why should you?
