The Ruling Class’s Strategic Mind

The great chess players think five moves ahead, or more. 

Clearly, members of the PGGWC (progressive, globalist, green, woke, Covid) class which now rules over the rest of us are great chess players.  We often hear of the long march through the institutions, a strategy formulated over time by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, the American radical Saul Alinsky and the German political activist Rudi Dutschke.  Essentially what they and their disciples do, endlessly, is to think ahead and manoeuvre the chess pieces into the positions they want them to occupy.  In order to achieve long-term goals and to change society.  For good.

Of course, the whole long march strategy is itself an example of chess master thinking.  The patience required for this has been outlined masterfully by Peter Hitchens in his recent Scruton lecture, with specific reference to the Tony Blair revolutionaries – no, Blair was no moderate – who met at university and formulated their own version of the long march.

I can tell you as often as I like that Anthony Blair was a student Trotskyist (a fact so hugely important and so hugely subversive of the carefully crafted image of this person that it was kept secret till years after he left office). I can tell you that a huge proportion of his Cabinet shared revolutionary backgrounds – Alastair Darling, Stephen Byers, John Reid, Peter Mandelson, Alan Milburn, Bob Ainsworth – these are just the ones whose pasts have come to light.  

… Tens of thousands of others whose revolutionary engagement was never recorded at all fanned out into the schools, oh, especially the schools, the law, the media, the academy, the civil service and perhaps above all the police. 

Some specific examples will also illustrate the point.

First, we have the creation of the administrative state.  James Burnham presciently wrote of the managerial revolution in the 1940s.  Little did he know just how pervasive one of the fruits of this revolution, the state bureaucracies, would be.  Equally perceptive were those noticing the rise of technocracy in the early twentieth century.  Bureaucracies that are now full of the perpetually green and woke have been handed unlimited power by spineless politicians.  Just ask Dominic Raab about their power.  Or consider the power of public health officials during a “crisis pandemic”.  The beauty of the bureaucracy is that it is beyond the reach of electors.  The unelected technocracy model has been outsourced and internationalised, to the United Nations, the international banks, the World Economic Forum and the European Commission.  Once we had ministerial responsibility under the Westminster system.  No longer.

We all know Donald Trump’s ambition – sadly unfulfilled – to “drain the Washington swamp”.  Michael Anton has noted:

In February 2017, Steve Bannon—at the time, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist—made something of a splash at the Conservative Political Action Conference when he identified the third of the Trump Administration’s three core “lines of work,” after national sovereignty and economic nationalism, as the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

Which brings us to John Marini.  Anton continues:

Marini didn’t coin the term “administrative state”; that was political scientist Dwight Waldo in his 1948 book of the same name. But there can be little doubt that the phrase wouldn’t have escaped Bannon’s lips if not for Marini. No one—certainly not Waldo—has done more to explain what the administrative state is, how it works, and how it came to be. And not just in the historical sense, though Marini does show how the apparatus was built, by whom, and for what purpose. But his far greater contribution is to lay bare its theoretical roots. 

… His analysis of the insidious ways the administrative state undermines democratic politics prepared me to begin to understand the populist revolt against bipartisan orthodoxy (emphasis added).

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/draining-the-swamp1/

The construction of the administrative state, seen at its sinister best in its “Deep State” progeny, has been a work of painstaking, hidden-from-the-public effort over a long time.  Its apotheosis has occurred in the Covid and Great Reset era.  It has been the enabler of scarcely resisted totalitarian rule at the behest of an international cabal of equally unelected and hidden-from-the-public puppeteers.  As Anton says, the administrative state dispenses with consent.  It is beyond popular reach.  And it is hidden!  A ruling class master stroke in a long game.

Second, there are the corporate and social media cancel culture plays used to silence opposition and entrench ruling class messaging and ideology.

As Tucker Carlson and Robert F Kennedy Jr have noted recently (courtesy of the late Roger Ailes), about three quarters of the legacy media’s funding comes from Big Pharma advertising.  This would simply astonish most people, were it more widely known.  Vaccine manufacturers and Bill Gates have invested wisely in funding media way ahead of their need for media reinforcement.  They have ensured through their strategic foresight blanket pro-vaxx, pro-lockdown coverage, globally, such that only one Covid narrative took root in the populous.

What of social media?  There was a great meme a few years back which showed Mark Zuckerberg and Adolf Hitler sitting in the back seat of a car laughing uproariously at Zuckerberg telling Hitler about social media and its power to create narratives and censor, and so silence, all opposition.  Talk about omnipotence.  What began with great promise as a vehicle for decentralising power and democratising knowledge has ended up delivering censorship, cancel culture, the silencing of dissidents, the shadow-banning of inconvenient voices, the fact-checker industrial complex and the creation of corporatist state narratives that cannot be challenged.

As TOTT News has noted:

The Twitter Files unveiled the long-known and sophisticated network of vast online censorship that was designed to shape government consensus over the COVID narrative.

We all experienced the distorted and dystopian tactics by the media, 'fact-checkers' and authorities to ban free speech over this period, setting a concerning precedent for the world (emphasis added).

https://tottnews.com/2023/05/09/covid-censorship-exposed-video/

This didn’t all just happen by accident.  Connected, influential tech figures harnessed the unbridled power and sheer reach of social media to embed their ideologies and to ensure compliance with the narrative.

Third, look at mass immigration.  A masterstroke of the ruling class.

There can be little doubt that government-directed mass migration and its ultimate purpose, multiculturalism and the elimination of “whiteness”, is a form of imperialism, certainly of globalism.  If we can’t get rid of nations, well, we will get rid of the national identities upon which those nations were based.  Paul Keating famously (if erroneously, in these days of The UniParty) once said that “change the government, and you change the country”.  Well, how about changing the population?  That certainly changes the country.  Far more, I would have thought, than simply changing the government.  As Christopher Caldwell put it (in the subtitle of his 2009 book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe), “can Europe be the same with different people in it?”  Can Australia or Britain, for example, under the weight of mass immigration?  Little wonder that John Cleese opined that London isn’t the same place it was.

https://paulcollits.substack.com/p/imperial-globalism-its-forms-and

How does changing the population help the PGGWC class?  Well, within a couple of generations, you simply get rid of whiteness, which is near the very top of the woke task list.  You create a new victim class, refugees.  You create (or hope to) a new cohort of those predisposed to vote for left-of-centre political parties.  You create economic demand that enables you (falsely) to claim economic growth off the back of immigration.  This is, of course why business loves immigration.  More customers and cheap labour.  Despite the fact that economic growth driven by immigration is a giant Ponzi scheme.  You further isolate the class of people you can endlessly call “racist”.  You have ongoing opportunities for virtue signalling.  And all of this has been achieved without average voters wanting it or demanding it.  Another brilliant play by the ruling class.

Fourth, there is the massification of higher education. 

This has been simply breathtaking in its simplicity and effectiveness.  The Marxists in our universities that dominate teaching and research formed informal alliances with the woke human resources class which now occupies over half of the staff positions in most universities, with policy-makers who have ramped up the numbers of students they bullied into going to university and with the education bureaucrats who determine school curricula and who have dumbed down two successive generations of clueless, content-free students.  Talk about a policy community!  It is a perfect combination.  Teach them what to think but not how to think, and fill the universities with a whole generation of potential automatons.

The aforementioned Tony Blair was merely one of a generation of politicians who endlessly urged more and more young people to choose higher education over more rewarding and productive career paths.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/apr/18/tony-blair-calls-for-drastic-increase-of-young-people-in-higher-education

Seventy per cent, for heaven’s sake!

People on the right wonder why the citizenry has been so submissive in the face of medical fascism and climate change madness, and so lacking in vigorous and rigorous protest.  There is no mystery, really.  People’s capacity for critical thinking, for seeing patterns and for formulating coherent, compelling response strategies has been cleverly removed over forty years or so of de-education and re-education.  Content has been removed from curricula.  Objective history has gone.  Numeracy and literacy skills have been sacrificed on the altar of the 1970s post-modernist theory.  Spelling lists and structured learning are nowhere to be seen.  The whole notion of “truth” has been supplanted by relativism.    Language is controlled, so as to control thought.  To dis-enable certain ideas from even forming in young minds.  It has worked a treat.

Now, no one is going to tell me that all of this was accidental, or a “cock-up”.  It was a painstaking process of ensuring that children almost from the day of their births become education wards of the state.  And keep them at school for as long as possible.  Then ferry them off to the local uni.  Parents have outsourced the nurturing of their children’s minds to childcare workers, teachers and university lecturers all trained in an ideology.  The ruling class has created a population ripe for submissively absorbing the agendas they are rolling out.

So … If nothing else, the last half century has been a series of advancing chess pieces being positioned in place by elites with clear objectives, foresight, persistence and a deep strategic sense, patient and focused.  And the examples of strategic planting cited here merely scratch the surface.  One only has to look back on the long game that is climate catastrophism, for example to see the methodology.  There are many others.  And there is much cross pollination between the different strands of activity.

The PGGWC class must simply marvel at the incompetence of their ideological opponents, a motley collection of conservatives, liberals, populists, and outsiders.  While disgruntled, they are also supine, often half-woke themselves, non-strategic, reactive, divided, forever squabbling, and inevitably missing the big issues.  They splinter into non-consequential political parties while their notional source of influence, the Tories, the Republicans in America and the Liberals in Australia, have all abandoned ship.  And they and their supporters are clueless on strategy.  They have no ideas on how to roll back the tidal wave of progressivism that has taken over the world, much of which has occurred, as the examples above demonstrate, outside the institutions of democratic government.  They don’t even know they are in a war, who the enemy is and what his tactics and strategies have been.  They may realise the need for a reverse long march, but they now hold too few aces to play a decent strategic hand.  They are like rabbits caught in the headlights of a hurtling leftist truck, mowing them down.

In short, they cannot play chess.  It looks, alas, like check mate to the PGGWC class.

Paul Collits

12 May 2023