2024: The Stand of the Based Americans

E. Rowell:  The author articulates what the majority of Americans are thinking.  However, I take issue with only one of his ideas: “If in 2016 Trump’s supporters knew something was up, if not quite what…”  In fact, Trump listened and learned from his supporters.  These hard working Americans in flyover country not only realized how different this America was from the America of our founding fathers, but they realized exactly what needed to change.  They were laser focused on policy issues and when they felt Trump had listened to them, and created policies based upon what was needed for their ability to thrive, they became avid Trump supporters.  This is how the movement was built.

By T. J. Harker, MANS WORLD MAGAZINE                                               5 March 2024

For the first time in more than twenty years, the ruling elite’s stranglehold on the nation’s power structures threatens to collapse. Simultaneously, ambitious mandarins in big tech, high finance, big law, and the administrative bureaucracy vie for supremacy in the face of a power vacuum that grows with Biden’s deteriorating mental faculties. Meanwhile, millions of ordinary Americans seek a common political principle around which to organize a coherent defense of their way of life. 2024 is shaping up to be the year in which the existing balance of power between these two groups is consolidated or upended. 2024 will be the year that the new based Americans finally join the battle against the established ruling elite and its regime mandarins.

The Ruling Elite and Its Regime

Though Ross Perot is a distant memory, his 1992 third-party presidential candidacy catalyzed the ruling elite into self-awareness. Surprised by his 19% of the vote, the ruling elite took notice of itself as an independent political force and realized it had to act to maintain its power. Quickly it consolidated control of the major party systems. Simultaneously, it developed a cadre of loyal, mandarin-like sycophants within the administrative state, most legacy media institutions, big law firms, and virtually all of high finance. Later, it welcomed big tech into its mandarin classes. Today, this organizational structure, together with a lowly class of prole-like enforcers and useful idiots, is “the regime.”

For the five consecutive presidential elections from 1996 through 2012, the ruling elite used the regime to become rich and powerful, almost entirely at the expense of ordinary Americans and the nation’s interests. But, in the absence of any serious challenge to their power, it became arrogant and increasingly incompetent.

Today, this process has culminated in a Washington D.C. clown show, in which nearly every apparatchik is incompetent in the most clinical sense of the word. Thus we see children holding senior administration positions; mediocrities with literally zero subject-matter experience appointed to cabinet level positions; caricatures of Darth Vader in positions of extreme sensitivity despite catastrophic failures; spineless shills routinely embarrassing the nation in international affairs; and milquetoasts who decide whether to enforce the nation’s laws based solely on regime-approved criteria.

Their self-congratulatory “the grown-ups are back in charge” mantra notwithstanding, the regime is not blind to its own widespread incompetence. But it also knows that it has no quick solution. There is no standby legion of elite technocrats to which it can turn for technical competence. The “scientific government” of John Dewey and the mid twentieth century progressives is a distant memory. This leaves the regime with no choice but to lie … about everything. Thus, in a weird way, the regime’s growing mastery of political propaganda is a consequence of its technical incompetence

The Based Americans

Standing against the ruling elite and its regime are a widening circle of based Americans. Say what you will about Donald Trump, he deserves credit for at least one thing: His 2016 presidential victory pulled the wool from the eyes of many benighted Americans. For the first time, millions came to perceive, however dimly, the growing incompetence of the regime.

Today, the nascent political awakenings of 2016 have begun to sink roots. It is slowly accreting a litany of unlikely allies into an increasingly coherent political force. From homeschoolers to homesteaders, Bitcoin enthusiasts to cattle ranchers, evangelical Christians to Hasidim, secular jews mugged by reality to second-generation Hispanics, wilderness survivalists to moms for liberty, and neo-Nietzschean GigaChads to walkaway homosexuals, plus thousands of other vital human beings, first millions then tens of millions, and perhaps more than one hundred million Americans, have now awakened to the grave threat posed by the regime. Politics make strange bedfellows, and all that.

If in 2016 Trump’s supporters knew something was up, if not quite what, today this ground swell of based Americans has also realized that the regime is a threat to their liberty and property; that its unifying purpose is to subjugate them; that it uses propaganda systematically to conceal its unbelievable incompetence from them; and that it is both incredibly dangerous and grossly incompetent.

It is that combination–the awareness of the regime’s desire to subjugate, its power to do so, and its gross incompetence–that resonates with Americans more effectively than any specific political agenda. We Americans are freedom-loving and action-oriented people, deriving our wealth and success from a combination of fierce independence, self-reliance, know-how, expertise, craftsmanship, tacit knowledge, experience, and technique. As such, we are highly attuned both to threats to our liberty and to professional incompetence. We know that plumbers who can’t fix pipes aren’t plumbers. Electricians who can’t wire a house aren’t electricians. Pilots who can’t fly aren’t pilots. And tyrants who can’t do anything else will work to subjugate us.

Based Americans now see that instead of preparing for and winning wars, DOD is laser-focused on sexual perversions. As a result, the regime hasn’t started a war worth fighting in at least 33 years, and hasn’t won any of those that it did. This will go on until we get our asses kicked.

Based Americans also see that instead of working to enhance the nation’s geopolitical posture, the CIA and State Department go out of their way to hire mental defects with diagnosed psychological disorders only to blunder catastrophically in conducting foreign policy by toppling stable and predictable foreign regimes, while propping up unstable and unreliable ones. This will continue until the CCP steals the last vestiges of our intellectual property, infiltrates every federal agency, and has accumulated sufficient blackmail on all our politicians.

We understand that the regime lawlessly permits the migration of tens of millions of third-world aliens into our heartland. Instead of using its abundant power and resources to stop this culturally adulterating flood, DHS spends money to encourage, welcome, and subsidize it, erasing American culture in the process. This will continue until no American classroom teaches about Abraham Lincoln or George Washington, but every classroom teaches about Salvador Allende. In Spanish.

Based Americans stand flummoxed by the regime’s fantastically childish climate agenda that erodes our national strength by prohibiting the search for, and production of, abundant energy. This is to continue until we ordinaries are cold and hungry, weak and frail, and stranded in the duplexes we rent from Blackrock. We won’t own anything and we’ll be miserable.

Based Americans now know that the CDC and the NIH fund gain-of-function research deep in the bowels of our greatest geopolitical rival, knowing that such research will be used to synthesize bio weapons of astonishing horror. Meanwhile the CDC—the Center for Disease Control—lectures us that “gun violence” is a public-health epidemic.

In short, based Americans now understand that transgender, dog-mask wearing generals aren’t warriors and won’t be able to defend us. That boy-faced small-town mayors with traffic circle design experience aren’t logistics experts and can’t unfuck the port of Los Angeles. That noble-prize winning “economists” who think war increases wealth have no idea how to enrich us. That beneficiaries of our racial-spoils system appointed to high positions in elite universities don’t know how to educate us. That medical “experts” who deny biological sex can’t be our children’s pediatricians. That public health officials who think “gun crime” is a health crisis, are not prepared to combat pandemics. That prosecutors who excuse mass violence by regime favored races while wildly overstating the frequency of so-called “hate crimes” will not protect our communities.

But based Americans also understand that all those same incompetent regime elites mean to rule us without our consent. I could go on. For a long time.

It is the confluence of the regime’s desire to subjugate plus its widespread incompetence plus newly based Americans’ awareness of both, that have set the stage for the battle for America. This battle has already commenced and will continue in 2024.

Regime Tactics in 2024

On the one hand, though the regime is incompetent, it is also incredibly dangerous. It is willing to use any tool at its disposal to attack and destroy any threat to its power, including the based Americans who oppose it. With this framework in mind, we can make a few predictions for 2024.

We should expect the regime to continue to gut the nation’s institutions in increasingly merciless ways to sustain its power. The state and federal criminal prosecutions and civil legal assaults on Donald Trump are only the most public examples. But the regime won’t limit its attacks to public figures. In 2024, it will continue to target ordinary people, just as it did with Ricky Vaughan, Enrique Tarrio, Derek Chauvin, and the thousands of January 6th protestors.

Just as the regime used coordinated lawfare to rig the 2020 election, it will devise clever ways to rig it again this year. If, despite their election-rigging efforts, Trump wins the Presidency, expect the regime to try to overturn the results. This isn’t conspiratorial speculation: it’s just their plan in their words. It’s their democracy, after all, and they mean to keep it.

The regime will also accelerate its public-private censorship efforts. It cannot compete in the space of ideas because it doesn’t have any. It has only attitudes and psychological dispositions, usually anger and fear. Since it has no ideas it also has no coherent policy positions to discuss. Since it has nothing to discuss, it risks losing the battle of ideas to anybody willing to defend any position whatsoever. This is intolerable to the regime, and so in 2024 it will vigorously censor any sufficiently public voice on any public or private platform.

At the same time, as election day approaches, it will continue to flood every communication channel with waves of endless regime propaganda. As Biden’s polling figures wax and wane, these lies will swing between the believable and the laughable. Take, for example, the recent circus of regime lackeys publicly applauding Biden’s supposed cognitive acumen on the usual Sunday morning propaganda outlets. This was the regime’s stupefying response to special prosecutor Robert Hur’s report that Biden’s brain was too far gone even for him to stand trial. Expect the regime’s lies to become utterly absurd. And terrifying.

Race is a perennial weapon of the regime, which has mastered the art of conquering by dividing. Since racial problems are more imaginary than real, however, the regime will continue to gin up pretend racial iniquities to sow division and otherwise weaken its opponents.  As 2024 progresses, racial grievance-mongering will reach fever pitch.

The regime will continue to weaponize the power of various federal agencies. Specifically, it will deploy these agencies’ regulatory, enforcement, and auditing powers to enmesh the regime’s opponents in a labyrinth of frivolous litigation, regulatory infractions, and bogus tax claims, ideally bankrupting them in the process. For the regime, this will have the dual benefit of silencing its outspoken critics while making examples of them to aspiring based Americans.

And, in 2024, the regime will continue to flood the nation with Third World illegal aliens because doing so is essential to the regime’s long-term strategy. It knows that if it wins the battle of 2024, nothing will prevent it from transforming these aliens into its Praetorian enforcers—granting them amnesty in exchange for their arms and their votes. Unlike your countrymen, however, these aliens-turned-praetorians will always vote for the regime but never hesitate to pull the trigger when you or your neighbors stand in the way. The regime is counting on it.

Based Americans in 2024

Unlike any time in modern American history, a sufficient number of Americans have awakened to the true nature of our political regime. Enough now understand that the regime has ruled and means to continue to rule at our expense. We are also, by now, intimately familiar with the tactics described above. In general, we know what to expect, even if we’ll be surprised by the specifics. Such is the way with battle since time immemorial. We also know the stakes.

Though seemingly insignificant, this situational awareness should not be underestimated. For decades, our common decency and ignorance were exploited by a cynical regime. We were used. No longer. Now we know what we’re up against. The ruling elite no longer has the element of subterfuge or surprise. With this, we should expect record voter turnout come November. We might also consider the possibility of tectonic demographic shifts as record numbers of Hispanics and black men turn on their ungrateful regime masters.

There is also the possibility of a few defections from the ruling elite, similar to that from Elon Musk and, possibly, Bill Ackman. The ruling elite understand the scope of the regime’s incompetence. Unlike ordinary Americans, however, some are in a bind. If in 2020, the ruling elite wondered whether Joe Biden had the cognitive stamina to complete his first term, today they have no doubt he cannot complete a second. But, to throw their support behind him would also require that they deploy an incessant stream of propaganda to mask his deteriorating cognition. Though many have no choice but to do exactly that, maintaining that façade for five more years is unappealing if not impossible.

On the other hand, if Biden won’t step down, they can’t get rid of him. Unlike Nancy Reagan who understood that her responsibility as a caring wife and decent person was to protect her husband and his legacy in the face of cognitive decline, Jill Biden seems indifferent to the fact that a growing percentage of Americans see her husband’s condition as sad. He’s becoming pitiable.

Thus we have a bizarre situation in which many in the ruling elite don’t want Biden to win, but also can’t backtrack on the horrible things they’ve said about Trump. They have no choice but to oppose Trump’s candidacy, if only out of fear of retribution by him for the things they’ve already said should he become President. Most members of the ruling elite are caught between the Scylla of Biden’s astonishing incompetence and the Charybdis of their Trump derangement syndrome. Most, but not all.

Some of the ruling elite have, for example, expressed doubt about Biden’s future. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan, recently applauded a few of Trump’s first-term accomplishments. These statements would have been unthinkable only nine months ago. As 2024 unfolds, we should expect to see a few members of the ruling elite become traitors to their class and support Trump. Most will do so tepidly, though some will do so enthusiastically. These may play a pivotal role in deciding the outcome of battle.

For decades, the regime ruled with an eye to its interest. It did so at the expense of the great body of yeoman Americans who remained resolutely—perhaps even naively—patriotic, even as our modest wealth was stripped, our proud history debased, our customs gutted, and our God mocked. We were almost completely disempowered. Almost, but not quite. Though we are the underdog, we based Americans will make our stand come what may in 2024. However it turns out, it will be a close run thing.

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TJ Harker is the General Counsel of a Knoxville, Tennessee company. Until recently, he was a federal prosecutor, where he investigated and tried national white-collar fraud and espionage matters for the Department of Justice. He recently launched Amicus Republicae on Substack and occasionally writes for The American Mind.