Knoxville attorney TJ Harker posts a truly magisterial essay.

2024: The Stand of the Based Americans
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 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.

A rather lengthy excerpt, yes, but at 2500 words plus, there’s still plenty of great stuff to read here. Harker covers all the bases, and covers them extremely well. Great stuff it most certainly is; in fact, I’d go so far as to say the piece is nothing short of brilliant, and I urge you to read it in its entirety.

Unfortunately, Harker appears to be a victim of the same “political solutions ONLY” syndrome all too many of our best and brightest writers are afflicted by, and I won’t try y’all’s patience further by restating my views on that. Buck Throckmorton, via whom etc, shares the Harker view:

When Harker talks of the brewing rebellion, he is talking about a political rebellion. We need to win this fight at the ballot box, but part of the battle we must fight is not to politely acquiesce again to ballot fraud.

Left undiscussed is how, exactly, this proposed “non-polite acquiescence” might be accomplished—let alone why, exactly, the mere idea of violent resistance to a tyrannical regime should be taboo in a nation which was founded, established, and secured by the selfsame methods we now preemptively forswear as utterly unthinkable, even as a desperate, last-ditch measure. The logical contradiction from which this puzzling conviction proceeds is as blindingly obvious as is the piss-poor result it must inevitably yield. I can only refer you to last night’s Heinlein quote-a-palooza for the antidote to such weak-tea sob-sister-ism.

Apart from that regrettable averting of the eyes, it’s nonetheless a fantastic piece—its central thesis enheartening, its language straightforward, its examination of the hows, whys, and wheretofores that brought us to this dismal pass impeccably reasoned—of which you should read the all.