The Potemkin Village is On Fire

And it's about time.

The Potemkin Village is a useful metaphor, though the original story may or may not have actually happened. The story goes that when Empress Catherine II of Russia was touring Crimea in 1787, her minister, Grigory Potemkin, had villages built along Dnieper River where none existed. As Catherine’s entourage approached, Potemkin’s men would people the village and make it appear to be bustling. When the viewing party had passed, the village was quickly disassembled and then rebuilt further along, to appear as another functional little town when the royalty arrived. The purpose was to impress the Empress and convince her group that things were going far, far better in Crimea than they actually were.

Over the years the Potemkin Village has become an idiom, meaning any construction with the sole purpose of making a situation (country, ideology, business, etc.) appear better than it is. Today, looking out over the daily news cycle, it is difficult to not despair, because it usually looks like Potemkin Villages, all the way down.

Much effort is made, by the media and by the government and its cheerleaders, to hide simple facts and present a panorama as real as a wax banana. There are all manner of deceits—men can become women and women become men, Black Lives Matter is an organization concerned with saving black lives, police violence poses a real threat to black Americans, open borders are a net good for the nation, Hunter’s laptop is not newsworthy and likely Russian disinformation, the GOP is anti-gay and hyper-Christian, Islam is The Religion of Peace, criminals aren’t really criminals, etc.--but at bottom there is one truth the powerful do not want anyone to see or talk about.

The progressive left, having seized the reins of the Democratic Party, took control of a prosperous and stable nation, and then made a concerted effort to tear it down.

When all of the “mistakes” fall one way, they are not mistakes. The FBI can claim (and they do) that mistakes were made, but none of these mistakes benefited Trump or the GOP. No Biden confidant was caught in a perjury trap, for example, and there were apparently no embedded agents in ANTIFA or BLM egging the riots on, as there were on January 6th and in the alleged plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer before the 2020 election. Accidents are random. Sometimes they’re heads, sometimes tails. So, if it is just a matter of missteps being made, simple human error, one might assume that from time to time the “accident” would benefit, oh, law and order, the energy industry, concerned parents, border security, Trump, or the GOP. Yet, that never seems to happen. The conclusion? These are not mistakes at all. The arc of the Biden administration, the behavior of the press, academia, and activists working in concert with the entrenched bureaucratic class, all point to one conclusion: they wanted to break the country. It was intentional. They gave it one hell of a shot, too.

The thing that everyone is discovering today is that this cadre of destructive activists are a very small minority and their activities will not survive the light of day. The drapes are up and the sun is shining. They are scurrying for cover.

The media can’t cover for them because they no longer control the narrative and are in disarray themselves. They burned whatever credibility they had remaining in a last ditch effort to deliver all control to the progressive left. Biden, we were told, is not a dotard but a moderate at the top of his game. The Squad were brilliant, forward-thinkers. Trump was just like Hitler. The Wuhan Flu came from a bloody open market, not a lab. Hunter’s laptop was a fiction, and repeating the story was a service to Russia. Vaccines and masks work, and were the only thing protecting us. Fossil fuels are bad (here in the USA, anyway, not so much in China and India). America is fundamentally racist and white people, by dint of their lack of melanin, are all guilty and complicit. Cops kills black people willy nilly and the only way to make black Americans safe was to defund the police. Gender is flexible and biology is wrong, women are just as big and muscular as men, fully capable of going toe to toe in any ring or swimming pool.

No matter who you are--the New York Times, CNN, or the freaking Delphic Oracle--you only get so many chances to be completely wrong before people stop caring about what you say. And when that is gone? It is impossible to run interference for the despicable weevils who have permeated our government and institutions. Fifty-one former intelligence officials signed their names to a letter claiming Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation. Have we heard a single mea culpa? Can that lame gambit ever be used again?

It was always an inchoate movement. As the gyre widened, the center could not hold. Follow the science but boys can become girls and vice-versa? Fight crime by not enforcing the law? Cure poverty by printing money? Too many conflicting narratives were put into play and only the few, dedicated mentally ill with blue hair, nose rings, and a Tic-Tok feed were able to juggle the cognitive dissonance. The rest of us threw up our hands and started laughing. Once that began? It was game over.

And it is over. The jig is up and the nation is aware. The people at the very top have known this was coming for some time. They cashed in early and became wealthy, insulating themselves from the repercussions. They’ll head off to the Vineyard or the Hamptons and leave it to flyover country to sweep up. Woke companies like Disney and Netflix will pay a tremendous price, but their reckoning will come as surely as it is coming to Twitter. Postmodern critical theory, the brainchild of a handful of truly awful people who happened to be philosophers—Derrida, Marcuse, and Foucault among others—is discredited; and though their reputations should be buried face down with the mouths stuffed with garlic and a stake through the heart, the damage their bad ideas have done will limp on like Marx and Engels.

It was a good con. I remember falling for it myself as a student, when faced with complex sentences and paragraphs and syllogisms that didn’t seem to hold up. This is school, I thought. Surely these people know what they are talking about, so the fault must be with me. The trick was to play on the inherent insecurity we all harbor, that suspicion that everyone else knows something we do not, and then to convince people that being inscrutable is the same as being a genius. It isn’t, but they sold it well. Critical theory has percolated through academia top to bottom, from community colleges through prestigious schools of law and medicine. Careers were made and doctorates granted, and it will be decades before the insanity clears our cultural systems, but the process has begun. Critical theory is bullshit, and that is now understood by all but a minuscule minority. Our elites are deluded boobs, and the people have seen it. Hard to put that genie back in the bottle.

Over the last few decades we lost the ability to discern the truly despicable from those we were directed to despise. Now the masks are off and we’re seeing the disingenuous rot, the genuine weasels we have allowed to lead--that we have allowed to treat us all like chattel, or worse, a resource to be harvested to serve whatever “emergency” they dreamed up.

The November elections are going to be a beautiful thing. Just keep your head down for the next half dozen months. Progressivism is going to be thrashing around in its death throes and lashing out blindly.