by James Fitzgerald, Corey’s Digs:

One of my favorite low-budget films from the 1980s was John Carpenter’s Escape from New York — an urban nightmare, where the imperial US is perpetually at war and the degeneracy of society results in a whole city being turned into a maximum security purgatory. Presumably the backstory involved protests that got out of control and which led to the annexation of New York’s Manhattan Island. There is a vicarious pleasure in watching characters navigating hellish dystopias — but the footage from the past week of American cities being trashed was gut wrenching.

My exposure to these events came through social media and took the form of snippets of footage and photos and two-sentence commentaries. I didn’t look at a newspaper or switch on the TV, because I feel there would be no surprises in their coverage. What quickly became apparent was the incredulity and panic among some civilian commentators when droves of people were shown invading shops and overwhelming the police presence on the ground. You could almost hear the heavy breathing and thumping hearts as footage filed in to Twitter from cities around the country. It seemed like only a thin blue line stood between the baying mob and the White House as darkness descended on Washington on the first night.

Some of those scenes of savagery and wanton destruction brought me back to my childhood, and the things I witnessed on the alleyways of downtown Montreal or later around the nightclubs of inner Glasgow, which in the late 90s had a problem with casual violent crime. The local media incessantly showed CCTV footage of young people being kicked unconscious and the physical aftermath of knife attacks. It was either a case of reporters not being able to keep up with the epidemic of violence or they were creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, by running the tally of recorded knife attacks in red ink on newspaper front pages, where formally the stock indices would have sat. The police response was to “put an officer on every street corner.” This policy either worked or the media got tired of flogging the same story, but the violence soon evaporated from the collective consciousness.

While attending college, I lived close to the High Court in Glasgow’s Merchant City.  Some of the people I would pass standing around waiting for their time before the judge looked like they had been dropped off by central casting for Day of the Dead. Their features had not formed in the womb, due to malnutrition or drug use by their mothers, so that their faces seemed to drip towards the ground, and the frustration and anger at being born with this disadvantage glared through their eyes. Any one of these people could have been very intelligent and talented but their appearance exiled them to the peripheral housing schemes where whole generations would grow up having never left the conurbation or city. Polite society didn’t even get a chance to shun them — they very often shunned themselves. At times I would get on the wrong bus, and end up at the terminus in some brutalist estate (those architectural monstrosities must have been designed by devils); did I get mugged or intimidated? Not really — or not when you might expect it, at least. More often a friendly local would ensure that I found my way back safely and would involve anyone else to hand, prioritizing my welfare over their own business.

When you grow up in rough cities you face from an early age the quandary of how to deal with fear — the prospect of being beaten up or mocked by the thug element.  A few people have such a serene consciousness that trouble never alights at their door, but for the rest of us it becomes a conscious or unconscious decision to be a runner or a fighter. Most people chose the former, because to opt for the later means committing to go all the way with any attacker — and also signing up for martial arts classes or the marines.

A couple of years ago, POTUS and FLOTUS spent the day at the house next door to me on a diplomatic visit. My garden abutted the estate and so I got a good view of the hardware employed to ensure their safety. Apart from the five police vans parked outside my door, there were two V-22 Ospreys perched on the lawn and a high altitude plane that hovered in a geometric pattern, just like a fly does, and during the nights preceding President Trump’s visit a bright yellow satellite added another tier of surveillance. If there was something above that, it would have required the Hubble Telescope to see it — but I wouldn’t rule it out.

There was a small protest organized at that time by, as one police officer put it, “the sort of people who read the Guardian [newspaper].” The cops must have been briefed on the general profiling of who would turn up. Amid the throng and carnival atmosphere, I had been stopped and asked by several locals why I was walking against the flow of people, away from the protest site. When I asked what issues they were protesting against, I didn’t get any cogent answers — mostly “Oh, you know, Trump.” The spectacle that materialized as the cortege of limousines approached the town was at face value a chanting opposition, but in fact it seemed like most people present were enjoying the camaraderie and free entry to the media circus. And many had brought their young children. Melania, I read later, had wanted to greet people in the town square, but had been advised not to for security reasons. I have no doubt that she would have endeared herself to everyone if she had ventured forth. The media simulacra might have been exploded, at least for those people present.

It’s stating the obvious, but special forces soldiers — and presumably Donald Trump’s Secret Service personnel — are selected for their resilience and determination. As one grizzled sergeant major put it to me once, “we want the ones who don’t get injured when they fall over.” That was his career advice when I showed up to do selection for the marines. Another veteran, of the UK’s Special Air Service, told me that he had never seen anything in a film that compared with the action he experienced in his military career. The idea that a mob of civilians would breach the White House gates and make their way to the Oval Office for looting and vandalism is not realistic; if that impression was given, then it is part of a narrative that posits civilians and their leaders as vulnerable to social upheaval and that the security services will either desert us or be defunded as soon as the mercury rises on the social barometer. In other words, a psychological operation (psyop). Special forces soldiers do not take the kneel in deference and they don’t run away when masked civilians run at them. The Covid-19 release and reactive infrastructure around the George Floyd killing have the hallmarks of well planned operations. The Antifa thugs are no different to the Brown Shirts I read about for a thesis on Nazi propaganda — they follow the same playbook.

The phenomenon we have witnessed since 2016, where an entire media sector universally attacks and slanders a sitting US president is a humongous red flag that another psyop is underway. I didn’t give a hoot about party politics until Trump was elected, and I wouldn’t still if some semblance of independence and impartiality was shown by the industry that employed me for 20 years. How can so many people fall into step behind a blanket smear campaign that gives no quarter and concedes absolutely nothing to this individual or his wife? What spell have these people been put under and what will be the consequences for that industry?

The riots were allowed to escalate, because that is how you draw out the poison — and identify those involved. The organizers and agitators will be identified and a round up will be in progress. We live in a surveillance state, remember.

It doesn’t take a genius to surmise that we are in the second phase of a country killer operation run by nefarious forces. It was always going to get worse before it got better: the Covid and George Floyd schematics, with the resultant hypocrisy of a lockdown reversal by public officials to allow mass protests, is actually a chink of light for those people who are still asleep. If that wasn’t enough, the Floyd scenario is being picked apart and inconsistencies in the footage of his arrest are being aired and discussed on social media. Anyone who has followed regime change in eastern Europe or Africa or the Middle East will have seen many of these tactics used before. Muslims, Hispanics and Christians should all be experts at spotting the messages and manipulations by now — demonize the incumbent leader; infiltrate ethnic and religious groups and push hatred and paranoia; instigate false flag events. The whole world is living through a degree course in “totalitarian mass media and social psychology”. Stay the course and do your homework; and we’ll see each other at graduation.

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