EMPATHY AND THE ELITES

    The latest manufactured controversy ongoing in the United States centers upon the US Congress. Every so often in our Postmodern Managed Democracy, Congress has to try and pretend that it is still relevant even though it long ago ceded any actual authority it had to the Executive and Judicial Branches. Invariably, these controversies coincide with declining poll numbers for whichever wing of the Uniparty holds office and/or upcoming election cycles. 

    What the Uniparty is debating for public consumption currently concerns a budget program ridiculously named The Big Beautiful Bill, in conformity of our current zeitgeist of government by Social Media and Spectacle. Like most of these documents, it was crafted by Special Interests and Corporate Lobbyists whose core policies of transferring more wealth and power into their Masters' hands will happen regardless of the political theater. The Bill includes a major revision of funding for Government-subsidized giveaways to Big Pharma and the Insurance Cartels operating under the pretext of a National Healthcare Program.

    Iowa Senator Joni Ernst caused some Media stir last weekend. Senator Ernst is another of the Prairie-Muffin Tradmoms who has positioned herself as a Christian Nationalist, despite some rather flexible compromises on Social Issues like voting to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act. These days, though, such peccadilloes can be overlooked since it seems that the only qualification one needs to be a Christian Conservative is not being a Democrat.

      Ms. Joni drew some criticism for speaking too candidly at a Town Hall meeting and expressing what the Republican Wing of the Uniparty actually thinks about the American People. Someone in the audience pointed out that people could die from these proposed budget cuts, Joni rolled her eyes in exasperation and told us all “For heaven’s sake, folks, we all are going to die.”

      Even though, for the past 18 months or so, Conservative pundits have been telling us that facts don't care about your feelings, and top advisers to the President and Christian Conservative megachurch leaders have been droning on relentlessly about the Sin of Empathy, some actually pretended to be shocked at the Senator's perceived lack of compassion. 

     The Corporate Media's sudden discovery that some Americans have come to believe that the Elites don't really care about them sent the Controlled Opposition into damage-control mode. Christian Nationalist and one of the masterminds behind Project 2025, Russ Vought (now the Director of the Office of Management and Budget) ran to sympathetic talk-shows to assure everyone that only undesirables would be effected, and dismissed the fears as political propaganda. The numbers of such undesirables is quite high: “one out of every five or six dollars in Medicaid is improper." Vought proclaimed without offering any further proof than Elon Musk's word for it, and added: "We have illegal immigrants on the program! We have able-bodied working adults that don’t have a work requirement that they would have in food stamps and other federal programs!"

    For her part, Ms. Joni issued an apology of sorts, explaining that "Those who objected to the prospect of death should seek eternal and everlasting life and embrace Jesus Christ," to "escape the fires of Hell" which no doubt awaits all who obstinately refuse Conversion to the New Right. 

      Now, nobody is denying that Medicare/Medicaid are now horribly corrupt and dysfunctional agencies. They actually do help a number of Americans---in spite of, not because of---their existence. An actual Conservative approach would be lowering the cost of healthcare by prying the Corporate leeches out of the system and investing in things like rebuilding the economy, schools, and infrastructure so that we don't have an ever-burgeoning Underclass dependent on Welfare. The way to reduce the costs of Social Services is to empower the people economically to the point where only a few actually need it. 

     But economic independence wouldn't serve the purposes of Big Pharma and the Insurance Cartels, nor does it serve the agendas of power-hungry politicians and Social Engineers. It doesn't serve the agenda either of Christian Nationalist and Dark Enlightenment fanatics who wistfully dream of the Early Middle Ages as some sort of Golden Age. All that Senator Ernst really did with her statements is to reveal what these factions have thought all along: that those not of productive use to their Overlords are, and should be, expendable. The religious varnish applied to cover these crimes is just as bad and as hypocritical as the old Divine Right of Kings doctrine that paid clerics once imposed upon humanity. 

     It is past time that American Conservatives started calling this out and stopped pretending that the Republicans and Democrats are really two different parties; or that either one serves anybody's interests but those of the Globalist Elite.