Forget the Supreme Court — The 2020 Coup Shows the MSM Is the Highest Government Organ in the US

This is an excerpt. The full, 6000-word, text at the source. Curtis Yarvin is a reactionary blogger who popularized the term “taking the red pill” that he borrowed from The Matrix.

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The message and logic of power

It’s important to recognize what courts are literally saying. When a court uses the doctrine of standing—not a timeless pearl of the ancient English common law, but a political invention by progressive judges in the 1920s—to decline a case, they are literally saying one or both of two things.

The first is that no one asking is entitled to ask. The second is that any legal process in this case would waste the court’s time. This same august Court has time to declare on behalf of a pedophile that half of Oklahoma is legally an Indian reservation.

This message goes well with polls that tell us that most of the loser’s voters think the election was stolen. The message to these people—at least two-thirds of Republicans, say 50 million—is clear.

They are ignorant and deranged. They do not matter. They cannot matter and they will never matter. They are not entitled to ask. Pretending to answer would be a waste of time. Objectively, all these statements are completely true, or almost completely true.

Yet the 50 million are still a problem. A democracy in which the losing party routinely and effectively delegitimizes the election is not a stable democracy. No one is thrilled that this seems to be the new normal. It is not surprising that the system tries to solve this problem, for it is a real problem. But we can learn something by its approach.

If you feel confident in the integrity of some system, and someone questions that integrity, your natural impulse is to check its integrity one more time, as exhaustively and transparently as possible—unless you think being convincing is unimportant.

The system does think the problem of convincing 50 million people, many of them heavily armed and mentally unstable, matters. What if a sincere, ingenuous response would only convince 10 million of them? That’s still, like, 200 army divisions.

If you are afraid of what you might find, though, you take a different tack. You use every possible approach to avoid any kind of investigation, except good ones. Good investigations are shallow and friendly. Bad investigations are adversarial and deep.

No one has ever done any kind of adversarial investigation or systematic forensic audit of American elections at a national or even state level. No one can responsibly say they have any idea what any such investigation would find.

And without the full powers of the KGB or the Gestapo in their prime, no such thing could conceivably be done even between November and January. So the Court is in a sense right—but not in a sense that anyone literally believes or would dare to say. This is what’s so cool about stealing the Presidency: though hard, it’s easy to get away with.

Even from the perspective of the official opposition, the path of investigating the election is inherently a giant shitshow, whose possible outcomes are (a) failing anyway, or (b) succeeding, and creating a bigger shitshow—a second Trump administration, which would inherently start in a state of near-civil war. From the official perspective, (a) is a minor success and (b) is a (hysterically exaggerated) world-historical disaster. The result: no one serious wants to go there.

Therefore, greatly desiring to change the hobbits’ minds, unwilling to take the risk of actually auditing an Albanian election, which might even turn out fine but also could emit a shitshow of almost arbitrary scope, the system reaches for its usual plan B. It activates… the Gigaphone.

Fully armed and operational

This active-denial system, the crowning achievement of 20th-century psychological warfare technology and the fundamental backbone of 21st-century democracy, is a kind of gigantic Paris-shelling railroad-gun bullhorn of pure proof by assertion.

At a certain caliber, assertion is no longer assertion. It is insistence. Increase the volume still further, and it becomes torture. The Gigaphone can indeed demonstrate the security of the election. Given arbitrary power—it can demonstrate anything.

The Gigaphone’s huge microwave dish hoses the unruly hobbit-mob with unendurable levels of red-hot contempt. With its throttle turned up to 11, the NYT’s headlines are ripped from the Rodong Sinmun, cat-lady middle-school teachers reading the New Yorker expect Waffen-SS paratroops to crash through their skylights, and the nation’s airports resound from lounge to lounge with the subtle sounds of TV Mille Collines. (All this is completely decentralized, of course. No one orders it—it just happens.)

The hobbit is simply embarrassed into compliance by his elven betters. The ideas he believes become a dangerous mental disease. This diagnosis is written into history. The sooner he gives up this nonsense, the better. To help convince him, we’ll make this idea quasi-illegal. The sooner he gives it up, the less his life will suffer. Eventually he can be fired for staying an idiot. Everyone will agree that he deserved it.

This is Popper’s paradox of tolerance. Popper discovers that every real regime must have the apparatus of the Inquisition in its back pocket. If it hesitates to deploy its intellectual rack and thumbscrew, it will be replaced by a regime with no such qualms.

Popper, read logically, advises the Nazis to repress the Communists, the Communists to repress the Nazis, the liberals to repress both and both to repress the liberals. From his “open society” he comes all the way around to Hobbes, Schmitt and Machiavelli. Next he will tell us, in Esperanto, that “the earth is nothing but a vast bloody altar.”

There are only two problems with the Gigaphone. One is that it does not have to be right to work. It is unaccountable even to reality itself. Its only limit is power. Given infinite power, it can blast anything into everyone’s head.

The second problem is that the Gigaphone does not have infinite power. It has a fixed caliber. It only goes to 11. It is currently being operated either at, or close to, 11. 11 will almost certainly work. What if next time the system needs 12?

The election and Trump himself are already in the past. They are cooked. Trump stepped in front of the beam one too many times, and ran out of his famous luck. There is no reason to remain in the energy cone of the Gigaphone. But he made it show its full power level, and not just this time—and that it can never take back.

The constitution and the press

We learned something else about the real constitution of America: that it is the press, not the courts, with the sacred power to inscribe official reality. The Fourth Estate is the highest estate, not the lowest—and always has been.

This election and its aftermath have once again reminded us that there is no serious or major institution in the United States, the Supreme Court certainly included, willing to challenge the mainstream press. There is nothing even slightly new about this.

When the New York Times wrote, in an overly-frank tweet it later deleted, that the role of declaring the winner of a presidential election falls to the news media—perhaps much as the role of declaring the winner of an Imperial election once fell to the Praetorian Guard —it said the quiet part out loud.

Fundamentally, the Times was right. And just a few weeks later, we would see it prove itself right—as might has a right to do. “Might makes right” is not an ideal but a fact. But might is power and power is government. The Times can never remove that ring. Ride once with the King, young man, and the saddle-marks will never leave your ass.

The press is a fundamental organ of government. Every government has a ministry of truth or some agency like it. A decentralized truth ministry, like ours, works the best. We are used to thinking of centerless things as better, because they are more varied. If a decentralized press coordinates on one perspective, it might as well be centralized— we do not need to understand why or even how it self-coordinates.

We can therefore treat both its nominally decentralized structure, and its nominally nongovernmental status, as fundamentally fictitious. Considering the legitimate press as a camouflaged arm of the state suggests new paths to systemic accountability. It also explains anomalous yet true observations—like the Times’ unfortunate tweet.

In our real constitution, the “news media” is much more powerful and important than the Supreme Court—let alone the totally fake and lame “electoral college,” this weird 18th-century game of human chess. It is quite right and proper for the Department of Truth to declare the truth of the election. Similarly, the Department of Defense is out there defending us and the Department of Agriculture takes care of, like, plants—duh. And is it not clear that, of all the departments, Truth is the most puissant?

The Times has its own form of government: literally, a hereditary absolute monarchy. This is a curious choice for the center of the center of power in a democratic country. Could that be how Chinese people feel about their system of capitalist communism?

For Americans to see that this medieval kingdom not only compares apples-to-apples with the Supreme Court, but in fact matters much more than that Court, is a complete violation of the whole American political tradition. Yet this idea is not at all new. It is older than the Constitution.

Everyone with a high-school education has heard the term fourth estate. And anyone who did AP Euro knows “estate” means “branch of government.” It doesn’t take no Aristotle to realize that, by putting its strongest branch of government—its ministry of truth—outside the government, the American school of constitutional architecture has only managed to create an unaccountable government above the government. Surely the Praetorian Guard in its day was no less sovereign, though I trust the Times more.

No surprise that at the historical and reputational core of this epi-government, we find an arrogant, capable, unaccountable hereditary monarchy. George III, call your office.

Source: Gray Mirror (excerpt)