I was watching this New York Times documentary about the extraordinary situation of pop singer Britney Spears, 39, who’s been in conservatorship for 13 years.
According to Wikipedia: “A guardian or a protector is appointed by a judge to manage the financial affairs and/or daily life of another due to physical or mental limitations, or old age.” Apparently, the only way out of conservatorship, in almost all cases, is to die.
According to Wikipedia: “Spears entered a psychiatric facility amidst stress from her father’s illness that same month.[245] The following month, a podcast titled Britney’s Gram alleged that Jamie had canceled the planned residency due to Spears’s refusal to take her medication, that he had been holding her in the facility against her will since January 2019 after she violated a no-driving rule, and that her conservatorship was supposed to end in 2009.”
I feel like the West has been in conservatorship since 1945. Upon seeing that the working class voted for the Nazis, the elites decided that politics could no longer be trusted and that all sorts of things such as national identity that were once the domain of politics are now off-limits to politics. Philosopher Tracy Strong wrote in his Foreword to Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political: “An intellectual consequence of the experience with Nazism was to effectively shrink, perhaps one might say homogenize, the language and terms of political debate in the subsequent period. As the Nazi experience fades from consciousness (at just over sixty years of age, I am among the last to have been born during the war and to have been taught by those with adult consciousness during the war), so also possibilities excluded by the specter of Auschwitz have returned. The revival of interest in Schmitt is consequent, I believe, to this increasing distance from the 1930s.”
* You could look at Gamestop trading where plebs were told they don’t know how to buy/sell stocks and the leading apps restricted trading, and social media companies cut off access in what looks like a coordinated attempt to snuff out a pleb revolution.
* Covid. You can’t say anything about Covid on the leading social media platforms that violates WHO guidelines. The WHO has acted as a mouthpiece for the CCP. Elites keep changing their minds on Covid, but they seem to always speak as though they are the experts and the plebs need to get in line to obey and there are only a narrow number of views good people are allowed to hold or they get get censored by social media.
* Race. Only a narrow range of views are allowed or you get censored and hounded.
* Martin Gurri writes: “There is an implicit ideology of the news. It rests on three claims: one, that consumption of news produces the omnicompetent citizen supposedly required by democracy; two, that news is a special form of information, complete in scope and objective in tone; and three, that the mission of news is to act as the voice of the people against the predations of power and wealth. As with most ideologies, these propositions are not internally coherent—but note that they enable news practitioners to feel morally superior both to the public (which must be educated) and the political class (which must be exposed).”
* Civil rights legislation means we no longer have freedom of association, in choosing who we rent to, employ, and live around. We are in conservatorship.
* Covid in the EU shows the failure of conservatorship to deal with reality. Martin Gurri writes: “I confess that I found it astonishing to see Angela Merkel, apostle of open borders, suddenly shut the gates to the entire country of Germany. Yet that was the reaction of every government in Europe. The EU was erected on the assumption that no existential threats remained in the continent. When the coronavirus crisis arrived, national governments immediately moved to protect their people: it was as if the EU did not exist. When Viktor Orban used the crisis to allocate extraordinary powers to himself, there was only silence from Brussels. When Italy desperately needed medical equipment, Brussels and the European nations looked the other way.”
Martin Gurri writes: “The behavior of the institutional elites during the pandemic recapitulated all the causes of the crisis of authority. They spoke with confidence from on high, as if they alone possessed the relevant information – but in fact the institutions of government and the health establishment lumbered slowly, handicapped by bureaucracy and a maze of regulations, while the digital public tracked the progress of the virus at the speed of light. The elites claimed to have the technical expertise to protect the population – but in fact they contradicted each other and not infrequently the same expert contradicted himself. In the US, for example, Dr. Anthony Fauci denied the need for a quarantine then a few weeks later mandated one; he also flip-flopped on the need to wear protective masks. The elites wrapped themselves in the mantle of science – but science isn’t a religion, and scientists turned out to have as many opinions as politicians. Thus the noise surrounding Dr. Didier Raoult in France, advocate of hydroxycloroquine treatment, who railed against “the tyranny of the methodologies” and has been labelled a “medical populist.””