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They simply have not. They're bereft.
Paul JayWell, I think we had the same argument about 9/11 stuff because I think Cheney's genius was he just essentially had to do nothing. And I think that's what McConnell did. He just had to do.
Larry WilkersonWas PNAC's (Project for the New American Century) most devout wish a new Pearl Harbor?
Yeah, exactly. Well, let's go into the repercussions of all this because whether it was deliberate or not, they got what they wanted.
Trump's doomed, whether they use the 25th or we were just talking before off-camera, maybe it will become de facto 25th that people will just start going to Pence and not listening to Trump for the next two weeks.
Larry WilkersonI think they already are.
Paul JaySo where does this leave politics? I mean, Biden gets inaugurated, he brings his team, and so I guess where does this leave the Republican Party that's got this weird split? You got McConnell, Graham and Pence, and others around them that have now bailed on Trump and are now enemy number one. If you watch Steve Bannon show or they're more furious at Pence and Loeffler than they are even the Democrats.
And you've got this rump of 100 House members that stuck with Trump.
Larry WilkersonYou in your opening impressed me in two ways. One, it was rather eloquent, and two, it echoed and better, even in a shorter space than I've done in an academic article I recently wrote for Limes, one of the Italian leading Italian foreign policy security policy magazines. They solicited it from me.
They even solicited a postscript after I sent them the article. The article essentially says what you said, and they said, well, you've got to give us something on Biden because it was all on Trump and Bush and Clinton and the progression to where we got yesterday. But you didn't start with Donald Trump. So I sent him a postscript on Biden and the postscript essentially said what you said, ain't nothing going to change. There will be some serenity. They'll be some better-kept alliances.
There will be some domestic action, maybe even domestic action that attempts to do something to the periphery of what is really haunting us, which is an amount of distribution of wealth, unprecedented in our history. But it really won't change much because as Michael Lofgren pointed out and I used his piece to sort of backstop my own, the deep state's in charge and the deep state ain't Donald Trump and it ain't Joe Biden. They are disciples and practitioners thereof, perhaps, and bought off by it, perhaps.
But they're not the deep state. The deep state is point zero zero one percent of the United States of America that owns the wealth equivalent to the GDP of Brazil. And they aren't going to let anything change that's against their purposes and their purposes are evolving and they scare me, they scare me to death because their purposes are looking more and more like IA and robotics, will eliminate what capitalism, predatory capitalism, in particular, has always wanted to eliminate its most precisely component, labor, get rid of it.
What does that mean? Well, it probably means a period of slavery. I mean, abject slavery for the average worker replaced by a period of we don't need you anymore, so let's conjure up a coronavirus or something, to get rid of you and let's replace you with technology. This is scary, but I really think that is part of what's happening right now. That's the new dimension of the 21st century that truly disturbs me, along with nuclear weapons and climate change.
Paul JayYeah, I agree with you. I've been talking about this, too. I mean, I don't know how quickly it happens because it's certainly going to be some time before they can really replace labor with cheap robotics but it's certainly coming.
Larry WilkersonThe period of slavery and it will be wage slavery, if not worse, in between, maybe just as disconcerting politically and disturbing politically as the period afterward. In fact, I would maintain that the period afterward would probably be much more simple in maintaining in a political sense, the interim period is going to be extremely dangerous trying to maintain it, because you're gonna have more and more of what you saw yesterday, only probably with a very solid rationale for being in the streets.
Paul JayWell, I think that's going to be the deciding question here. There's a couple of things that I would put on the positive side of the ledger where maybe there could be something coming out of these next four years. The fact that the House majority for the Democrats is so narrow, it is going to give some clout to the progressives in the House, the fact that the pandemic is out of control and raging.
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