I posted on Friday about the consternation expressed by bien-pensants all across the West about dangers to “our democracy”. If you pay attention to what the globalists who claim to represent our interests tell us, the survival of Our Democracy™ requires us to follow the directives of people and organizations that are collectively identified as “stakeholders”. Stakeholders include a fairly large cabal of organizations, political leaders, and representatives of various corporations, NGOs, and charitable foundations. It goes without saying that ordinary voters are not considered stakeholders.

“Stakeholders” is a buzzword that has emerged in the last couple of decades to describe the dirigistes who plan for the future of Our Democracy™. If we were referring to Russia, they would be called “oligarchs”, or further afield in the Third World, perhaps “warlords”. But since these estimable folks are here in the enlightened West, they are simply “stakeholders”.

And we know, of course, that they have our best interests at heart.

The problem is: those pesky voters don’t always understand what their best interests are. When confronted with the difficult issues posed by our advanced technological society, they often make the wrong decisions. That’s why they need the help of those stakeholders, who are better informed about the nuances of our high-tech 21^st-century civilization.

On the other hand, it’s important to maintain the polite fiction that the ignorant voters are the ones making the decisions. They’re guaranteed a voice by the universal franchise that was so painstakingly won more than a century ago. It is their right and duty to decide the direction of their affairs via the ballot box.

So what is to be done?

The stakeholders have developed three major strategies for directing the hoi-polloi in their electoral choices.

1. Propaganda

Up until 2016 this was the principal method used to generate the desired result in any given election.

First of all, it’s crucial that the major media be brought under stakeholder control. In Europe and Canada the process is simplified by state ownership of all the major television and radio outlets. In the USA the situation is somewhat more complicated, since most media are ostensibly in private hands. Funnily enough, however, all the major outlets move in lockstep on the most important issues, reliably promoting the line pushed by the stakeholders. Even Fox News is controlled opposition — it is set up as the despised right-wing alternative, yet it never veers far from the acceptable center. And that center has been moving inexorably leftwards since the end of the Second World War.

Various agencies of the permanent administrative state can bring pressure to bear on media outlets to persuade them stick to the preferred narrative. The explosion of official media regulations over the past few decades has guaranteed that every media corporation is breaking multiple laws every day, whether it intends to or not. Selective prosecution is an effective tool to keep the MSM in line. Those who stay within the accepted boundaries are left unmolested, while any outfit that strays too far from the narrative risks being hauled into court and tied up for months or years for violating various FCC regulations. The federal government’s pockets are bottomless, and any media corporation that runs afoul of it will eventually be slapped with a big-time fine, and will have to pay its own legal expenses. So it’s much easier just to stick within well-understood limits.

That’s the stick. The feds can also deploy multiple carrots: subsidies, tax breaks, lucrative contracts, concessions granting exclusive coverage of major public events, etc.

I don’t know all the exact ins and outs of this control system. All I can say with certainty is that the results are obvious: we have compliant media that move in lockstep on every important issue. This was made abundantly clear during the COVID-19 “pandemic”, when all major print and broadcast media simultaneously got with the CDC/NIAID/WHO program and never veered from it. It was uncanny.

The media control system generally worked well up until 2016. One of the legacies of the Second World War was that people had developed an ingrained trust of their national governments, which were perceived as beneficial institutions. As long as that reservoir of good will was still sufficiently deep, people could be herded and “nudged” into the desired behavior patterns, and would vote for candidates that were considered acceptable. The cherished illusion of the ballot box in Our Democracy™ could thus be maintained without having to resort to obvious coercion and fraud.

During every election the democratic process ran its course. The stakeholders would guide the selection of the candidates, and voters would be allowed to choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. It didn’t matter which one they voted for — both were considered acceptable to the Powers That Be, otherwise the stakeholders wouldn’t have put them in place.

Relentless media propaganda would always demonize one of them as “far right”, however — otherwise the center couldn’t be pushed relentlessly to the left. Statistically speaking, the media barrage had its intended effect: on balance, voters opted for more state control, more socialist policies, and more destruction of traditional cultural practices. And the bright shiny progressive Utopia thus drew ever closer.

Unfortunately for the stakeholders, the usual process got derailed in 2016. Tweedledum and Tweedledee were supposed to be Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. Hillary would have won easily, but it wouldn’t matter if the voters resisted the leftward ratchet and chose the “far right” Jeb instead — the latter was fully captured, and posed no threat to the system.

But Donald Trump upset the applecart. He was not under the stakeholders’ control, and it wasn’t supposed to be possible for him to win the nomination, let alone the general election. When he did, the system was threatened. A tremor ran through the foundations of Barad-dûr.

And Mr. Trump wasn’t the only threat: Brexit also caused the earth to shake under the rules-based order of the West. The ignorant, turbulent voters on both sides of the Atlantic had gone against their programming and made choices they weren’t supposed to make.

The stakeholders closed ranks after 2016 and pulled out all the stops to make sure that nothing similar could ever happen again. In the process they were forced to reveal themselves — they had to step out from behind the curtain and wield an iron fist with its velvet glove removed. It was a salutary moment: what had once been a vague outline in the shadows now stood out sharp and clear, red-eyed and fanged.

People became aware they had been manipulated. As a result, the customary propaganda began to lose its effectiveness. It was no longer so easy to fool the Lumpenproletariat. Different tools for control needed to be selected from the stakeholders’ toolbox, which brings us to…

2. Suppression of Dissent

Propaganda alone had not done the job. At least some of the voters had somehow been able engage in independent thinking, which could not be permitted to continue. They needed to be herded back onto the path, and the fences on either side of the path had to be strengthened to prevent any further escapes.

Fortunately for the stakeholders, the machinery for control was already in place. After 9/11, the Patriot Act and other legislation had granted surveillance powers to the intelligence community on a scale that had never been seen before. Especially after smart phones became ubiquitous, it became possible to monitor all electronic communications and eavesdrop on ordinary citizens to an extent that Stalin could only have dreamt of.

Thanks to the rise of the Internet, social media had become the principal forum in which political opinions were expressed and exchanged. Even before 2016 the major social media platforms — Facebook, Twitter, etc. — had “partnered” with the three-letter agencies to exert control in order to prevent “extremism” and “terrorism”.

After Trump was elected, that partnership metastasized. The federal government advised the platforms about what posts needed to be deleted and which accounts should be banned. One by one all the well-known dissident voices were de-platformed. Anybody who was prominent and spoke out against the narrative could expect to lose his ability to communicate with a mass audience.

The arrival of the Wuhan Coronavirus during the 2020 election campaign turbo-charged the censorship process. Anyone who argued against the official policies of the CDC, the WHO, and other public health agencies was ruthlessly suppressed. When the experimental mRNA treatment intended to mitigate the effects of infection with the virus was rolled out, the suppression intensified even further.

From public agencies the censorship process trickled down to the rest of society. People who expressed unacceptable opinions were ostracized and lost their jobs. In some European countries dissidents were charged, convicted, and fined for offenses against accepted COVID truths.

So here we are four years later, and all the draconian censorship and lawfare actions have failed to stop Donald Trump. To make matters worse, support for other “far right” parties has increased, threatening to produce unacceptable electoral results.

For a while it appeared that Marine Le Pen and Rassemblement National might muster enough electoral clout to break through the cordon sanitaire and take power in France. But, as I write this, it appears that Left-Communist alliance, conspiring with President Emmanuel Macron’s party, have successfully collaborated to keep the “far right” out.

And Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, despite its impressive performance, obtained a mere five seats in the House of Commons after Thursday’s elections in the UK.

Nationalist, anti-immigration parties are being stymied at every turn by globalist stakeholders. The stakeholders’ servants in the USA have made it clear that they will do whatever it takes to prevent Donald Trump from being inaugurated President in January of 2025.

Which brings us to…

3. Counting the Ballots

This is too big a topic to cover here; it requires its own post. In the meantime, read the related essay by Sundance at Conservative Tree House It’s well worth your time.