CHAPTER THIRTEEN   

The Endgame

If you walk down some streets in some outlying villages in Kosovo—and many Normal Americans have—you can still see ruins even two decades after the civil war. The background of the war goes back hundreds of years, and in the way of the Balkans you can find yourself listening to the locals talk about some terrible crime committed by their neighbors and realize that terrible crime occurred over five hundred years ago. But there is a lesson to be found among those piles of brick and plaster. It’s a lesson about what happens when people decide to toss out the rule of law, albeit an imperfect and shaky one, because all that process and all those pesky rights get in the way of their objective, and instead install the rule of power.

The Serbs decided they were not going to be bound by laws and concerns for the rights of the Kosovar Albanians, so they resolved to use their power to drive the K-Albs out of the country. That did not go quite the way the Serbs expected, in large part due to NATO airstrikes, and the Kosovar Albanians ended up taking vengeance upon their tormentors in that way that karma seems to have of turning the tables and then hitting the wrongdoers over the head with one of the chairs. It was the Serbs who ended up being ethnically cleansed once the K-Albs jumped into the driver’s seat; many of those ruins are of Serb villages.

There’s a lesson there. If you change the rules, just be sure you’re good to go with playing by the new rules. Because you may hate the new rules.

Which brings us to the United States of America as the Elite ramps up its campaign to exclude the Normals from power in the wake of their cri de coeur. The Elite, largely because its new progressive ideology taught it to hate the very people it was created to serve, has abandoned the pretense of sympathy for those it leads. The Elite no longer subscribes to the basic principle that those who govern do so only through the consent of the governed. It does not believe that Normals have any right to govern themselves. In fact, it thinks that Normals must not be allowed to do so. And the new rules it is playing by say that the Elite can do whatever it wants to do in pursuit of that goal.

Except this presents a problem, because the Normals internalized all that stuff they were taught in their public schools about citizens having a say in how the country is run. This is especially true among those who actually put on camouflage to go defend the country; they get a little touchy about being told to sit down and shut up.

But that’s what the Elite wants them to do—well, not the “sit down” part. You can’t work sitting down. The Elite wants—needs—the Normals to keep growing their summer squash and driving it to their Brooklyn co-ops, and pumping their oil to fuel their Priuses (despite the whole Gaia/global warming apocalypse unpleasantness). The Elite wants the Normals to keep doing the dirty work. It just wants them to close their Budweiser holes and do what they are told.

Sure, the Normals can vote. Absolutely they can vote. Voting is a vitally important right of every American, as long as he votes right. They can vote for either of the two approved Elite candidates that the Elite presents them with.

Policy debates, such as they are, are properly conducted between factions of the Elite community. Normals? Butt out, hayseeds.

But the Normals did not get the message. The Normals are militant, thanks to technology stripping the Elite of the ability to completely control the public conversation, a track record of Elite failure, and an Elite that has grown progressively worse at hiding its members’ manifest active hatred for Normal Americans.

So, in 2016, after a few pokes at the Elite, they elected Donald Trump, and there are many who see him as the Normals’ last chance. If he fails, the Normals fail, forever. But that’s not true.

Donald Trump is the Elite’s last chance.

It was they who made Donald Trump their hill to die on, an uncomfortable metaphor in light of the trend lines. When you hate someone, and they know it, they tend to hate you back. The Elite’s hatred of the Normals has been matched by hatred of the Normals for the Elite.

It’s bad when the two main elements of society start hating each other. Really bad.

And it is not just the center-right wing of the Normals, the traditional smaller-town Main Street types, that is pushing back on the Elite. Many left-of-center Normals, who suffered the same economic neglect and contempt as the rest of their caste, tried to be heard by pushing Bernie Sanders. Many of these were real workers (not baristas and other aspiring Elitists) who never saw themselves on the cutting edge of a movement. Though misguided, they just wanted the economy to stop being rigged in favor of the big boys.

But the progressive Elite stole the nomination from Bernie and handed it to the candidate they chose, the candidate of the big boys. Sure, Bernie Sanders is a dictator-fondling fool who embraces an ideology that butchered tens of millions, and his biggest ideological fans (mostly Elite) are morons who think that socialism is totally due for a win since it’s failed every single time it’s ever been tried. But the Normals who supported Bernie adorably thought that the Elites running the Democrat Party would play by the alleged rules, and that if the people chose him, he would win.

As socialists they are, by definition, suckers, but this was ridiculous.

The fact is that the Elite has systematically stripped away the pretense that it is bound by any rules. Elitist Hillary Clinton skates on her email beef when any Normal would be dodging unwanted attention on the cellblock. Elite media abandons objectivity but demands the respect that comes from objectivity. Elite Wall Street scamsters lose billions and get bailed out, but don’t you dare miss a payment on your Jeep Wrangler.

You get the picture. So do the Normals. And they don’t like it.

After all, rules that only govern one group of people are not rules at all. They are weapons, tools of control. And the Normals are sick of being controlled.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

The endgame is perilous. History tells us that violence and chaos are not off the table. Rome was a republic once, too, and there once again factions chafed at the obstacles the law and the norms put between them and power. Tradition, the mos maiorum, gave way to expedience. And relative peace and order gave way to violence and chaos.

The guys who were not Augustus sure hated the new rules.

At stake here and now is the kind of country the United States will be down the road. Up ahead is a stark choice, two diverging paths.

Will America return to being the kind of representative democracy the Founders envisioned, where the ultimate power rests in the people?

Or will America continue to evolve into an Elite oligarchy that not only oversees the day-to-day operations of the major institutions of American government and society, but that determines the ultimate direction of the nation, all while remaining immune from any accountability to the people it rules?

In many ways, the answer is tied to the fate of Donald Trump, less because he is a leader of the movement to restore power to the Normals than because he is a symbol of it. He has performed much, much better than almost anyone expected as president, but if the Elite can use their rigged system to defeat him, either by tanking his presidency politically or by literally hauling him out of the Oval Office in cuffs, then they believe they will have defeated the Normals. Things can go back to how they were, with the Elite divvying up power and spoils among itself, free of the hassle of answering to farmers in Nebraska and insurance claims adjusters in Georgia.

But that might not be how it goes at all. In fact, the odds are against it. No society has ever purged itself of Normals; the Normals will always be out there, and the Elite will never be able to totally ignore them. The danger is that the Elite, serenely confident of its own invulnerability, will provoke the Normals and spark a conflagration that it cannot control.

Trump might well be the last chance to get out of this mess with the country intact, for the Elite to take a collective personal inventory and start exercising some if its vaunted smarts, and start paying attention to some of the dangers that loom ahead.

If they defeat Trump, how on Earth can they know that whoever the Normals get behind next won’t be worse? Not just worse in their fever dreams, but actually worse? They call Trump a crook and a dictator and all the rest, but they forget that Trump’s own flaws were overlooked by the voters in no small part because the Elite’s minions gleefully howled about how George Bush was in on 9/11 and Mitt Romney gave a chick cancer.

The crying wolf thing?

It’s a thing.

The Elite could pause to think through the next few years. Trump had, contrary to the expectations of most of the Elite, shepherded through a divided, unpopular Congress a radical (and radically pro-Normal) tax reform bill that immediately started putting money in the wallets of Normal Americans. Notably, it was also probably the first true legislative counterattack against traditionally Elite groups in decades—if you were, say, a lawyer in an expensive coastal blue state, you got schlonged.

The markets were bumpy but also trending up, with unemployment down and consumer confidence growing. ISIS was on the skids because Trump unleashed Secretary Mattis and the military and we stopped playing footsie with these goat-banging seventh-century creeps. Trump’s numbers were rising from the murky depths of Gallup and Quinnipiac like some swamp creature bent on taking vengeance upon the fellow swamp dwellers of the Elite.

That would have been a good time to pause and think things through. A rational response on the part of the Elite, because they like logic and profanely love science and so they embrace rationality, might be to look at the facts. The Normals were mad. And, to be fair, they did have some legit beefs. Wars, economic stagnation, illegals. Maybe there was something to that, and as the Elite maybe, just maybe, the response was… suboptimal. But there is a huge—yuge!—appetite out there for a return to normalcy, for a return to calm, to peace, and to prosperity. In some ways, they might assess, Trump is prevailing by doing that.

Maybe we in the Elite could kind of get behind that. Not roll over for him by any means, but instead of making everything no-quarter warfare, cooperate a little. Lower the temperature. Deemphasize the Trump/Russia thing—certainly stop pushing in the whole pot hoping that Robby Mueller’s holding a royal flush.

Lull the Normals back to their ideal state—unconscious. Unwoke.

But the Elite will not do that. It cannot do that. It’s not just a matter of power and prestige anymore, the traditional motivations behind the Elite. The Elite has gone beyond being a class and has morphed into a cult. It is not just a material choice but a moral one. In the absence of God, they have to worship something, and what they worship is themselves and their own Elite moral vision.

The Elite cannot back down because to do so clashes with the very identity they adopted when they became Elite. They rule because they have a right to rule; the Normals do not rule because they are unworthy of it. Embrace that notion and you are Elite. And you are unable to compromise.

The Elite cannot change its path and cede power back to the Normals because to do so destroys what makes itself the Elite.

So they will continue to #resist. They will continue to fight the devolution of power back to those who rightfully should have it at every step, at every turn. They will fight in the urban community gardens, they will fight in the faculty lounges, they will fight on the Sony Pictures studio lot, they will fight in courts of appeal and in the halls of Congress.

They shall never surrender.

Life is not worth living if they do, because they will no longer be Elite.

So, basically, someone has to lose. The Normals or the Elite.

With the Elite #resisting, the Normals cannot go back to sleep. They cannot simply turn away from politics and go back to their lives, though they would prefer to. This will only make them more militant, because the definition of a Normal is someone who wants to focus on other things besides running the institutions and worrying about whether some teen boy who is pretending to be a girl gets to pee with the ladies in the Billings Montana Unified School District.

And normalcy holds another hazard for the Elite. Its own supporters and activists will become less supportive and active if the vibe of permanent crisis fades.

As long as the Republicans hold the Congress, the political battle will be a rearguard action by Democrats against any legislation that undoes even a thread of the massive web of Elite self-dealing that is the American government today. That is not to say that many of the Republicans in Congress are not Elite, or that they do not sympathize with many of their class’s prerogatives. It is just that the Republican voter base is so thoroughly Normal and so thoroughly vindictive to apostates that, with the exception of smarmy posers like Jeff “18 Percent” Flake and Ben “Oh, Well I Never!” Sasse, they will be compelled to go along with Trump’s pro-Normal agenda.

No matter what Robert Mueller says or does, the Elite will seethe and demand impeachment, if not burning at the stake. Of course, a couple years of hysterical accusations of “TREASON!” by hyper-partisan liars will not exactly build confidence in the truth of the findings. In the end, impeachment is a political act—you have to get the votes in the House and then in the Senate. And the rules have changed from back when it was Republicans who sealed Nixon’s fate. The new rules, enacted during the reign of Clinton I, say that impeachment attempts are partisan maneuvers that have nothing to do with the merits of the charges, even if DNA testing confirms their accuracy.

Bottom line: Good luck with impeachment.

The liberal Elite is going to hate the new rules.

They will fight in the courts, both by blocking Trump’s appointments and by mobilizing their own judicial partisans to help. The whole thing about not having to obey the established rules comes in really handy in a judicial setting—when you get rid of that archaic business of relying on precedent and the written text, you are free to follow your heart. And every judge who followed his heart ended up following it as it made a hard left turn.

Until now. Trump is going to appoint up to a third of the federal judiciary before he leaves office. Those darn new rules sure are a pain.

State governments on the coasts will keep firing on Fort Sumter. California recently announced its intention to arrest and prosecute people who cooperate with the federal government’s immigration laws, though its jails—which it emptied of real criminals because of compassion and stuff—will soon be filled with waiters busted for handing out unsolicited straws. Sanctuary cities abound. Democrats apparently think that this time they will get secession right.

The media will keep the faux-urgency of #TheResistance alive, because the 24/7 “THIS IS THE WORST THING TRUMP HAS EVER DONE EVER!” mode helps eliminate the possibility of a return to normalcy, and therefore the possibility that the enthusiasm of the Elite’s foot soldiers might fade.

The Fredocons and the bowtie boys often fret that Trump provokes this himself, and he occasionally does to great and frequently hilarious effect, but it is ridiculous to accuse him of being solely responsible. Trump was accused of having a White House in crisis, so he moved in John Kelly, and when that chaos stopped, the press simply shifted narrative. When the president tweets, the tweets are the outrage. When he doesn’t tweet, something else is the outrage.

CNN will trash Trump for doing nothing if he does nothing, and for doing something if he does something. It does not matter. It will continue, because when you stick a moustache on a guy and call him Hitler, you pretty much have to go all in against him.

The entertainment industry will keep up its political theater/festivals of Elite onanism with events like the 2018 Grammy Awards, where Gramma Clinton staggered out to read selections of Michael Wolff’s silly book to an audience that was down 24 percent from the prior year. Hollywood will churn out more television shows and movies about courageous heroes fighting the threat of a guy who has never arrested anyone for opposing him.

The bureaucracy, even as it undergoes a slow-motion purge through the machinations of time, will keep trying to do what it wants, which means what the liberal wing of the Elite wants, and it will continue to be mortified at the thought that it is answerable to anyone but itself.

Will Trump win this war, meaning “Will the Normals win this war?”

It is too early to tell how Trump will do, though the signs are in his favor—something that could change overnight. Fate will play a part. If that fat weirdo in Pyongyang decides to start a war, that could change the picture completely. If there is an earthquake in Los Angeles and people believe the media when it tries to pin the blame for California’s incompetent response on Washington. That could change things, too.

If Trump loses one or both houses of Congress, that becomes a problem. If he does what to date he has not done and betrays the Normals who elected him, that would become a problem, too. But then, betting on the Normals won him a presidency that everyone—certainly everyone in the Elite—told him was unwinnable. At this juncture, you have to see Trump as the favorite for 2020, especially with the kind of panel of nobodies yearning to take him on.

• Kamala Harris? A California lawyer who loves illegal aliens and got her start as the gal pal of a famous Sacramento politician?
• Joaquín and/or Julián Castro of Texas? Two guys who are always the next Great Dem Hope, but who never end up as anything more than Lone Star Martin O’Malleys? And what is it with Democrats choosing candidates with dictators’ names?
• Elizabeth Warren? An elderly Harvard Law professor who gamed the affirmative action system by pretending she was a squaw?
• Joe Biden? Really?

These are perfect avatars of the Elite. Except for the Wonder Twins, they come from blue states and adhere rigorously to all the tenets and doctrines of their religion, Elitism. At least Biden can fake it with Normals. If he found himself among a bunch of firemen, you can just hear him begging them to let him sit in the ladder truck’s driver’s seat with the Dalmatian.

But the rest? Harris wouldn’t be caught dead outside a ZIP code where the mean income was under six figures, the Castro Brothers can’t even win a statewide office in Texas, and Warren lecturing steelworkers in Michigan about their white privilege would simply be awesome.

The danger, the real and scary danger, is if the Elite starts winning. They will not only ignore the problems that made the Normals militant in the first place, but they will focus on both ensuring that the Normals never again have the ability to interfere in the Elite’s affairs while punishing the Normals for their insolence. They will clamp down even as they ensure there is no way for the pressure to vent.

Think of what they would do, if they could—and remember that the rules will not constrain them. The filibuster that is holding up Trump’s agenda? That is gone—the liberal Elite is not going to pass up a way to impose its will merely because it has fifty-two senators and some old tradition is in the way. The courts? Look for a succession of leftist loons unconstrained by what they think are old pieces of paper written by dead white guys like a hundred years ago or something.

And we have already seen the unparalleled corruption of the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation under Obama. That corruption would get surpassed big time.

After all, if it is okay to fake warrants to spy on Republican campaigns, and A-OK to use the IRS to harass conservative groups, what is the moral argument to stop the Elite from doing much worse to its enemies once it gets back into power? There is none, because the Elite does not consider it wrong to use all its power—or rather, all the power that Normal America lent it to do the job of running the institutions—for its own benefit. And the fact that Normals are evil makes it an affirmative duty.

They will push and push and push.

Taxes? Normals will be paying more, because Normals are merely livestock for the Elite.

Speech? What the government does not ban outright—get ready for a leftist Supreme Court to discover a footnote to the First Amendment containing a “hate speech” exception—Elite companies like Google and Facebook will eagerly censor. Say good-bye to the alternative media and to a free-wheeling social media. Welcome back the gatekeepers, and this time they are making sure the walls stay good and high.

Fossil fuels? Enjoy the bus.

Political correctness? Forget the ideas of colorblindness, gender blindness, and so forth. Get used to being ranked somewhere on the hierarchy of oppression, and if you are Normal accept the idea that you are going to be at the bottom.

Religion? Fine, if you never speak of it or act on it and if the Elite doesn’t get around to hassling you about it just for the fun of teaching you your place.

Your guns? Oh, well, that’s a twofer. It both insults Normals by demonstrating that they are serfs, not citizens, and eliminates their ultimate veto over tyranny.

To Normals this sounds like a nightmare, but to the Elite this is a to-do list.

Yet there is a complication. And it’s one a group of people who have largely never been in a fistfight might not have fully thought through.

Normal Americans do not like being hassled. They get annoyed. They get angry. And they fight back.

The Elite forgets itself, and how it relies on the Normals’ sense that obeying the law is the right thing to do. Laws are not enforced by cops waiting to pounce, but by citizens who instinctively obey the law. Watch a stop sign in your neighborhood at three in the morning, when no one is out. Almost everyone stops. Why? Because that’s the rule.

But when do the rules lose legitimacy? When the other side is not playing by the rules.

The Constitution contains rules. It contains promises. And the Elite ignores them at its peril. You unilaterally change the rules about speech, religion, and guns, and you are likely to find the Normals changing the rules about your authority to do anything.

At the end of the day, power is an AR-15 held by a guy willing to die to accomplish his mission. Normals will die for their freedom—military cemeteries are full of Normals who did. But who is willing to die to accomplish the mission of suppressing the Normals for the benefit of the Elite? Are Kaden and his pals going to suit up in Kevlar and start showing those hicks who’s boss? Are other Normals going to collaborate?

Nope.

From their coastal vantage points, the Elite has grown accustomed to its authority being respected and its direction taken without question. But what happens when it is not? That is the new rule, isn’t it? Elites in California and elsewhere, with their sanctuary declarations, have chosen to defy elected officials holding the positions of power in Washington over policies they dislike. What’s to keep the governor of Texas from doing the same when President Elizabeth Warren announces her “commonsense” gun confiscation executive order?

They are really going to hate the new rules. The guys who changed the rules in Kosovo did, too.

How this will be resolved remains unclear, but there is hope for optimism. The Normals outnumber the Elite, and they are voting. But at the end of the day, the Normals have a lot more guns. So, basically, the Normals only lose if the Normals choose to lose.

What is clear is that this cannot go on forever. America cannot survive with an Elite that hates its own people, especially when that hate drives the Elite to wage a cultural war against them.

One side has to win; the other side has to change. Either the Elite has to morph back into a caste that shares and respects the basic values of those it leads, or the Normals must opt to accept permanent serfdom under the stiletto heel of people who despise them.

If you have ever hung around Normal Americans—and many of the Elite never have—you probably know which one of these options is simply not going to happen.

Normal Americans built this country, powered this country, and defended this country.

They are not about to give up their stake in it without a fight.

We won’t give up our country without a fight.

We owe it to that guy from Fontana.