“We have been gaslit and deceived in the name of democracy” Wall Street Journal

Four years ago, the Democratic machine needed a a loyal and reliable figurehead to advance their version of statism, climate extremism, and wokery. In a frantically move, they mobilized the party, partnered with Covid, and colluded with swing state election officials to get Joe Biden elected. For the past four years, the passively compliant American public has been gaslit and deceived into believing Joe Biden was a capable president. 

This charade was unraveled in the first presidential debate when it became clear when President Biden’s mental acuity was exposed. Biden has done his best to be a loyal Democrat, pushed into service to act as presidential as possible. Now that the jig is up, the same Democratic machine culprits are mobilizing against him. 

If a cognitively impaired president is not pulling strings, then who is? The Wall Street Journal believes that; “Unelected advisers, party hacks, scheming family members, and random hangers-on make the critical daily decisions.” They call it the Washington Village. The WSJ version is short and too general for such an important topic. I will expound upon this issue by expressing my belief of who makes up the Washington Village. 

The visible side of the Village includes all the characters we learned about in school. The politicians and those appointed by politicians make up this facade. The lead actors include the presidents, senators, and representatives. Huddled around the president are cabinet members, ambassadors, and federal judges.

However, the engine that drives this Washington Village includes three groups of power brokers.  The first layer is the unelected bureaucrats, the permanent, administrative components of the federal government. The most prolific are the executive agencies in and around Washington, DC. Politicians number a couple of thousand people, but the unelected bureaucrats account for about three million. 

The second group is the political authorities and intellectuals. These are the “experts” in academia, the think tank crowd, and the selected few “journalists” at prominent media organizations. This group makes excuses and justifies the actions and ambitions of the political class. They act to affirm the state’s legitimacy in the minds of the citizenry. The narcissistic group serves as the state’s propaganda force. Lured by ego, they realize that the little people will not pay for their intellectual services. They sell their souls for official recognition, access, and tax dollars.

The third group and most influential are the plutocrats. They are the people and firms who owe their profits and wealth to the federal government and who lobby and pay to use government power and money to line their pockets. These include the CEOs of the big banks and the weapons companies that supply Washington’s war machine. A matrix of interlocking ‘clusters’ like Congressional leaders, Big Donors, Wall Street, the Treasury, the CIA, the FBI, a few cosmopolitan oligarchs, and the security-intelligence world belong to this group.

This triad of schemers sells a pretense of a liberal democracy operating in tandem with a ‘classic’ liberal economy.  They call it ‘Rules-Based Order’ and use it to expand the U.S. empire. The reality is an illiberal oligarchic leadership sitting atop a governmental-corporate financed economy that has sucked the life from citizens to create toxic inequalities the little people must navigate.