(Last) Weekly Roundup: Breaking Vlad Edition

"Has anyone checked Putin's Twitter feed to see if he made any old racist posts?" This joke, originating in a hundred places and being shared a million times, is a wry comment on how the Uniparty operates... but it's at least reality-adjacent to what looks like the second attempt to "cancel" a world leader via the same basic tools they use on you and me. The first attempt, of course, was the mostly successful organized campaign to drive Donald Trump from the world stage by attacking him with legal and financial tools.

Trump was always going to be vulnerable to tactics against him (and his family) via banks and corporations for the same reason that most normal people can usually be manipulated into the correct behavior via an attack on their jobs: he's out there, doing business, exposing himself to the risk of public pressure against that business. By contrast, President Obama was like the college kid who harangues you on Twitter and lives in his parents' basement; when you don't own or earn anything, you can't have that taken away. The Uniparty made Obama rich with a single $65m "book deal" advance that couldn't be taken away, against ghost-written books that have yet to sell 15 million copies in total; that's what we call "payment for services rendered to the Cathedral".

Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, is probably the second-least-cancellable human being on the planet, after Xi Jinping. He runs a near-superpower with an iron fist, subject to neither public pressure nor election results. Russia is close to being a functioning autarky and its primary trading partner, China, is where everything in the world is made. It is energy independent and rich in natural resources of all types. While the Western media is painting Putin's reasonably surgical movement into Ukraine as an abject failure, that version of events aligns only loosely with events on the ground, which suggest a Blitzkrieg pace of advance towards key objectives despite using a force that appears to be made up largely of reservists and "cherries".

Of course, if Mr. Zelensky's forces were doing as well in real life as they're doing in the media, you wouldn't be seeing a coordinated global effort to attack Mr. Putin using every tool at the Uniparty's disposal. Whether you approve of the Ukraine invasion/liberation/?? it's worth watching this, because if they can break Vlad, they can break anyone.

From Saul Alinksy's Rules For Radicals:

13. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

This is how the current powers that be get things done, and it's the tactic applied against every level of power from "racist Facebook uncle" to "President of Russia", with the Canadian truckers and January 6th demonstrators somewhere in the middle. Those of who are astounded at the hypocrisy shown by countries who once numbered themselves among the "coalition of the willing" but who now anxiously decry Putin's move against the Ukraine... remember that hypocrisy is actually a flex, that these countries are showing off their power to first reward the USA for executing a completely innocent Saddam Hussein and flattening his people just a decade or so before deciding to turn around and punish Russia with all the non-military tools at their disposal for an action that, if it is not actually justified by Ukraine's actions, is much closer to being justified than were America's actions after 9/11.

The most interesting thing done by the Cathedral has been its decision to freeze the assets, and seize the yachts, of wealthy Russians living outside the country, in the open hope that one of them will have Putin killed. Some of these people were already Putin's opponents, and that's why they were out of the country; others had no direct involvement with the current situation. Oh well. Petty concerns like that didn't stop Bank of America from combing its credit-card records to identify "participants in the insurrection", and they didn't prevent the freezing of over 200 bank accounts linked to the "Freedom Convoy" in Canada.

One consequence of our evolution into a hyper-connected world is that both criminal efforts and enforcement efforts can move far faster than the traditional legal apparatus. The drug kingpins can move money and material faster than a courtroom can monitor and address, so the American Government gave itself full powers of attainder at all levels, from local to federal. The government can take what you have without a whisker's worth of due process, if they really want it. If you resist in any meaningful way, you will be executed by an agent of the State. Everybody agreed that this was great -- as long it applied to really bad guys, not the MAGA Grannies. In hindsight, it was never a great idea to let governments convict people before they were even charged with a crime, and now it's standard practice for political criminals of any stripe.

The seamless coordination of government and Fortune 500 makes this even more sinister. If the powers that be don't like your protest -- in other words, if the purpose of the protest is to decentralize power, rather than centralize it -- they will freeze your accounts and hold you without bail. Any attempts to raise money for your defense will be "de-platformed". If anyone helps you too fervently, they'll find themselves on the terror list as well. And all of this can happen without central control, because anyone with any power in America nowadays knows exactly what the goodthink is on these matters and can act accordingly without consulting anyone else.

This effortless coordination means that police-car Molotov-bombing attorney Urooj Rahman has been out on bail for years while receiving unlimited financial support from family, friends and fellow-travelers. She was just permitted to plead to a single charge out of many: "making a destructive device". She made several, and she tried to burn a cop alive, but we won't worry about such matters. The sentencing has been separated from the plea, something that always happens where there is extreme leniency afoot and the judges want to let the eye of the public turn elsewhere before exercising it. Don't worry, folks, because it is "almost certain" she will lose her license to practice law. Almost certain. Let's see how certain it is in a few months, shall we?

Meanwhile, a fellow who walked into the Capitol to chant "USA!" has been frozen, personalized, and polarized to the point that he felt it necessary to take his own life rather than face the legal railroading he saw happening to other people who were in Washington, DC that day. Oh well. Kill the chicken to scare the monkey, as the Chinese say.

Can Putin be disposed of with the same ease? Don't bet on it. To begin with, he has the ability to retaliate in authentic fashion against his persecutors. Forget flying a couple of planes into the WTC; there are enough fiercely loyal ethnic Russians in Manhattan to make the transportation and detonation of a "suitcase bomb" a relatively trivial matter. The economic warfare and warfare-by-Ukranian-proxy undertaken by the West against Putin is always subject to the heckler's veto of an ICBM or two (or two hundred). The West is relying for its continued existence on the goodwill of a man whom they brand as "insane" and "evil" on a constant 24-hour basis.

Whatever happens in the next month, we will certainly learn a lesson in the limitations of "soft power" and "hard power", and in the interactions of same. If Putin backs down, then the Cathedral will have just one remaining challenger in the form of Mr. Xi. A final boss, if you will, and one who is exponentially harder to defeat.

In the meantime, if you're concerned about the application of "soft power" to yourself and your family, it's worth imitating some of the actions being taken by Russia. A UnionPay credit card that can't be "canceled" at short notice by a Twitter mob or a low-level government functionary. Gold and silver in usable everyday amounts. Crypto, if you're into that sort of thing. Enough defensive capability that you can't be dominated by street-level political gangs and puppets.

Assuming there is no sea change or Schlesingerian reversal in American politics, the time will come when all of us will be frozen, targeted, and polarized. That includes my readers who currently believe themselves to be admirably progressive and/or on the right side of history. Some people will go to their graves proclaiming that they love Big Brother. Others will choose to die on their feet (or knees) rather than living on their knees (or feet). In those final moments, will we derive any sorrow from knowing that we were treated the same way as the fearsome, tyrannical Russian President? Or will we find a minor solace in knowing that mice and bears are slain together, and alike?

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For Hagerty, I reviewed a fast bike. There was no "Avoidable Contact" due to travel.