Friday, September 19, 2025

Cooperating with the enemy (updated again)

We criticize with impunity the Trump administration's assault on the free speech of late-night comics who ridicule him, or business executives and government officials who disagree with his policies, or his call for federal troops to patrol US cities for "combat training," but this is only the initial phase of his assault. The impunity will likely vanish as Trump, who presents himself as a semi-literate buffoon, is revealed as an effective and highly focused spearhead of a destructive movement against all humanity, a movement much more powerful and dangerous than others originating in post-World War II America, such as the comparatively ineffective campaign against free speech and thought in the early 1950's, termed the "McCarthy era," led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was disgraced and robbed of power before he could destroy the country. From indications so far, Trump, though he may be disgraced, will not be robbed of power before he achieves what he is after.

What he is after, with worldwide backing from people after the same thing, is ownership and profit derived, first, from demolition of the world's current civilizations, followed by replacement of outdated humanity (us) with humanity 2.0 and revised civilizations. This transformation will happen remarkably fast-with or without Trump - probably in the lifetimes of young people alive today. It will have varied conceivable outcomes, some less nightmarish than others, depending on whether only Trump and his ilk, or other, possibly more benign forces influence it. Its roots come from science: new abilities to speed up evolution by manipulating human genetics, and to make what has been the strikingly powerful human brain secondary to Artificial Intelligence. At the end of the process, we will have no more in common with humanity 2.0 than we have with tribal humanity 300,000 years ago. In fact, we'll have more in common with humanity 300,000 years ago.

Trump and his fellow investors have hitched their wagons to this developing future, with the goal, not of creating a new and better humanity, but of acquiring tremendous wealth and power.

Trump seeks dictatorial rule in order to carry out his role in the transformation. Any resistance from the populace will likely be derailed in large part by distractions of war (also useful in demolishing civilizations), presented as arising in response to unprovoked attacks on us by enemy groups or nations. On one level, the attackers may be actual enemies, while on another, less ideological level, there are often parties in enemy leadership willing to reach covert agreements with our side on critical details, like the timing and nature of attacks. We have a history of such covert agreements. Dexter Filkins, in The New Yorker magazine, wrote that the US made covert deals with the Taliban during the Afghan war about where and when it would attack US troops; former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957), advocated covert agreements with our “enemies” on where and when to drop nuclear weapons on each other.

With such precedents, it seems likely that the increasing opposition to Trump’s evolving Stalin-esque dictatorship, emboldened by the results of the recent off-year elections and a newly erupting Epstein scandal, will prompt Trump to seek a major distraction, and the easiest one to engineer - since his foreign policy already promotes it - would be a seemingly unprovoked attack from a foreign source against the US, an attack so violent and disruptive that we will forget about censored comics, Epstein cover-ups, prosecution of Trump critics, federal troops patrolling US cities, chaotic tariff policy, tearing down the White House and all the rest of his outrages. We will be too distracted to think about anything other than surviving foreign attack (for a fictional, predictive analog, consider George Orwell’s novel, 1984, in which a future "super-state," Oceana, fires rockets at itself to maintain a unifying sense of siege).

[Update, 10/28/25: The current Israeli/Hamas deal on the hostage release and future of Gaza, since it comes at a time of increasing public questioning of Trump's rule, could serve as a test of the premise that the true obective of war is often to distract from domestic tensions. In such a scenario, after the hostage release in October, if Hamas remains in Gaza and resists disarming, this could be followed by new Israeli strikes on Hamas, this time backed by the US, followed by an especially violent attack on the US, perceived, correctly or not, as perpetrated by Hamas, followed by war - now involving webs of alliances on both sides - of such intensity that a government takeover of American media will seem a necessity, rather than one of the war's essential purposes.]

[Update, 11/2/25: Last week, shortly before meeting with China’s leader Xi Jinping, Trump announced that he is considering resumption of nuclear weapons testing, which could entail US detonation of nuclear weapons for the first time in 33 years. Trump said that this testing would be in response to resumed testing by Russia, China and North Korea. In reality, there have been no reports of resumptions of testing, or threats to do so, from Russia or China. North Korea does continue to test, but this, by itself, would seem slim evidence that we should resume this highly dangerous and world-threatening practice, and would not explain why we don’t use other means to change North Korean policy, like asking China, the country with the most influence over North Korea, to intervene against testing. The backdrops for Trump’s misrepresentation of Russia and China were press reports, a few days before his meeting with Xi, that China has accelerated its construction of silos to house nuclear weapons, and that Russia is working on delivery systems - nothing about testing. Trump depended here, as he often does, on many people's habit of not noting the details of news stories, then blindly accepting Trump's rewrites. As a bonus, by making his announcement while meeting with Xi, Trump promoted Russian anxiety about possible US/Chinese collusion. With three-way paranoia achieved, Kissinger’s advice can be followed, with a few atom bombs dropped on regular folk, producing world-wide panic and confusion, while sparing the collaborators and their sycophants, who will creep out of their bunkers after the radioactive dust settles (see Peter Sellers’ satirical but chillingly accurate depiction of Kissinger in Stanley Kubrick’s classic film “Dr. Strangelove”) to construct their cloned, AI driven empires.]

What can we do about our situation other than enjoy a short-lived freedom to make fun of it? I don't see what one individual can do. You might as well have tried to stop World Wars I or II by yourself. One credible hope might be a well-funded and determined group that is focused, not on stopping the transformation of our species - that can't be stopped - but on demanding that humanity 2.0 retain significant human memory and identity, and some independence from the new kings, pharaohs and would-be gods now salivating at their prospects.
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Cooperating with the enemy (updated again)

We criticize with impunity the Trump administration's assault on the free speech of late-night comics who ridicule him, or business ex...