Hindsight Is 2019

This New Year's Eve celebrated not only the closing of a year, but of a tumultuous decade. The 2010s will be studied in the same way that we read Plutarch and Cicero to learn of the collapse of the Roman Republic, Thucydides on the fall of the Athenian Empire, or Hugo on the French revolution. In this decade it became clear that the old order - the first democracy in the modern era, which spawned the greatest superpower in all history - has ended. We could debate endlessly about how long American democracy has been a mere illusion, but the more important date would be when that illusion was dispelled, and that has occurred in the past decade.

The 2010s marked the end of the conspiracy theorist, as numerous leaks and other public events confirmed many allegations of rampant corruption and conspiratorial scheming among the elites. Fringe commentators like Alex Jones were pushed out of social media not because public sentiment had turned against them, but because they were increasingly seen as truthful.

In 2013, Edward Snowden leaked numerous NSA documents revealing that virtually all communications were being monitored in the US. The liberals, who routinely took to the streets to protest George W. Bush's abuses of power, responded to complete eradication of the 4th Amendment with a collective yawn. It wasn't the what but the who that they were interested in.

Also in 2013, an IG report revealed that the IRS had been weaponized against certain conservative groups. While the IRS has never ranked highly in popularity surveys, seeing a department full of accountants turned into a political weapon was alarming. At that point, one is forced to wonder which parts of the federal government had not been corrupted.

Also in 2013, the personal emails of Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal was hacked by the Romanian hacker Guccifer. They revealed that Hillary Clinton had been informed that the real reason for waging war on Libya was the geopolitical interests of some of the European powers - particularly France.

In 2014, Colorado decriminalized marijuana despite it being rated amongst the most dangerous of substances by the federal government. Going into the new decade, only a handful of states are in compliance with Washington's orders, with full legalization even in the district itself!

In 2015, the DNC and Podesta emails were leaked to the public. They revealed numerous aspects of corruption and criminality, most notably

1. collusion of the DNC with the media to nominate Clinton over Sanders, to the point of leaking her the questions that would be asked in the CNN-hosted debate
2. a smoking-gun document of pay-for-play bribery within the Obama administration
3. that Clinton's campaign staff are literally Satanists

While these crimes and numerous other examples of elections fraud and the deletion of emails under a preservation order went unpunished, the DOJ spent several years investigating Trump and his circle raking for evidence of crimes under the guise of trying to solve the email heist mystery - despite never inspecting the DNC server or interrogating Julian Assange.

In 2016, the DOJ & FBI engaged in a full-fledged legal coup against Donald Trump. This would include directly embedding spies into the campaign, attempting to plant evidence on his advisors, lying to a FISA court, and laundering illegally obtained and shoddy evidence through FISA warrants, the media, and even the late Senator John McCain. The Washington establishment made it clear that it was they, not the American people, who have the final say in who is allowed to become president.

From 2016 onward, the mass media engaged in almost systematic self-destruction by a constant barrage of manic conspiracy theories regarding President Trump. The response has been that the most dishonest outlets like CNN have been bleeding viewers, while the less dishonest Fox News has become dominant in nearly every timeslot. 

Similarly, the political establishment has done everything possible to erode the legitimacy on which they themselves stand. The Democrats who threatened at every turn to impeach Trump if there had been Russian collusion, or Ukrainian collusion, or if  Mueller was fired, etc., then got impatient and decided to impeach him anyway. We go into the 2020s with an ongoing spectacle that primarily demonstrates to the public that the rule of law is dead in this country. It is all legal warfare which will likely spill into armed warfare.

Finally, in 2019 notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein - alleged by many to be a key link in a high-level blackmail chain - was arrested at his New York mansion. Many wondered if this was finally the first signs of the corrupt swamp being drained. Instead, Epstein managed to commit suicide as a VIP inmate, after previously attempting suicide and being put on suicide watch, and with cameras that managed to malfunction and guards that neglected their patrol duties nearly all night. This has been too much even for the liberals who normally soak up every lie fed to them by the media, with "Epstein Didn't Kill Himself" jokes running strong from all corners of the political spectrum. In a post-Epstein world, everyone is a conspiracy theorist.

That is the decade in recap, although I've likely omitted other significant instances of democracy's death on public display. We go into 2020 with fighting words being exchanged between the government and gunowners in northern Virginia - the home of the original civil war. Not only did this decade reveal the transition from a democratic order to one of open legal warfare, it ends with the first hints of the conflict going hot. The old Chinese curse goes, "May you live in interesting times." Here's hoping that the 2020's will be positively bland and boring in comparison to the past decade, although it's becoming hard to envision what that scenario would be.

Update: I did forget one event I meant to include, and it is the most important of all for its symbolism. What could be a more concise description of the past decade than this image?