n C.J. Hopkins
Brave New Normal So the War on Populism is finally over. Go ahead, take a wild guess who won
I
’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t the Russians, or the white supremacists, or the gilets jaunes, or Jeremy Corbyn’s Nazi Death Cult, or the misogynist Bernie Bros, or the MAGA-hat terrorists, or any of the other real or fictional “populist” forces that global capitalism has been waging war on for the last four years. What? You weren’t aware that global capitalism was fighting a War on Populism? That’s OK, most other folks weren’t. It wasn’t officially announced or anything. It was launched in the summer of 2016, just as the War on Terror was ending, as a sequel to the War on Terror, or a variation on the War on Terror, or continuation of the War on Terror, or … whatever, it doesn’t really matter anymore, because now we’re fighting the War on Death, or the War on Minor Cold-like Symptoms, depending on your age and general state of health. That’s right, folks, once again, global capitalism (aka “the world”) is under attack by an evil enemy. GloboCap just can’t catch a break. From the moment it defeated communism and became a global ideological hegemon, it has been one
evil enemy after another. No sooner had it celebrated winning the Cold War and started ruthlessly restructuring and privatising everything than it was savagely attacked by “Islamic terrorists”, and so was forced to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, and kill and torture a lot of people, and destabilise the entire Middle East, and illegally surveil everybody, and … well, you remember the War on Terror.
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hen, just as the War on Terror seemed to be finally winding down, and the only terrorists left were the “self-radicalised” terrorists (many of whom weren’t even actual terrorists), and it looked like GloboCap was finally going to be able to finish privatising and debt-enslaving everything and everyone in peace, wouldn’t you know it, we were attacked again, this time by the global conspiracy of Russian-backed, neo-fascist “populists” that caused the Brexit and elected Trump, and tried to elect Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, and loosed the gilets jaunes on France, and who’ve been threatening the “fabric of Western de-
22 ColdType | Mid-April 2020 | www.coldtype.net
mocracy” with dissension-sowing Facebook memes. Unfortunately, unlike the War on Terror, the War on Populism didn’t go that well. After four years of fighting, GloboCap (aka the neoliberal Resistance) had … OK, they had snuffed both Corbyn and Sanders, but they had totally blown the Russiagate psyop, and so were looking at four more years of Trump, and Lord knows how many of Johnson in the UK (which had actually left the European Union), and the gilets jaunes weren’t going away, and, basically, “populism” was still on the rise (if not in reality, in hearts and minds). And so, just as the War on Populism had replaced (or redefined) the War on Terror, the War on Death has been officially launched to replace (or redefine) the War on Populism … which means (you guessed it), once again, it’s time to roll out another “brave new normal.” The character of this brave new normal is, at this point, unmistakably clear … so clear that most people cannot see it, because their minds are not prepared to accept it, so they do not recognise it, though they are looking right at it.
