2,054 words

Oh-oh, yes, I’m the great pretender
Pretending that I’m doing well
My need is such, I pretend too much . . .
— The Platters, “The Great Pretender”

Who is pretending that the United States of America has any resemblance to what this country once looked and felt like?The “states” are not “united.” The borders are wide open. Voodoo “diversity” priests simultaneously deny and “celebrate” the “Great Replacement” currently underway; the once great achievement of European-heritage, American people increasingly resembles a dilapidated, moldering Third World slum.

“My need is such, I pretend too much . . .” Indeed. Looking around, the need to pretend is understandable; the Republic is not “doing well.” Great pretending, of necessity, has become a way of life in the land of the free and the home of the brave, and the form that it takes breaks down into two distinct kinds demarcated by the fault lines of power. The ruling class pretends to govern on behalf of its citizens, and the citizens pretend that the office holders are responsive to their interests. The former in fact despise the later; some portion of the later still think that the oligarchs are democrats.

It helps to be reminded that the current regime is an anti-reality regime composed of actors who read lines from a script about a pretend world they pretend to govern. All the players – the octogenarian, fat cats in the lead roles, the careerist yes-men on the rise and the bureaucrats who fill out the supporting cast – are selected for robotic conformity to a groupthink, swollen to absurdist dimensions, the practical applications of which puts the “worst” people, “full of passionate intensity,” in charge.

Oh-oh, yes, I’m the great pretender
Adrift in a world of my own
I played the game but to my real shame
You’ve left me to grieve all alone . . .

The Platters – The Great Pretender – Lyrics

The second verse of the Platter’s classic captures the woe of white blue-collar and middle-class Americans. They “played the game,” but it has been rigged against them for a very long time.

Yes, we are on our own, adrift, and for those not yet feeling loneliness and grief, there’s the never-never land of pop culture — ESPN, NFL, tail-gating, celebrity worship, Netflix, shopping — bread and circuses provided by the woke entertainment industry. All of it serves as a distraction from the reality of the lies and corruption and the descending immiseration.

The aftermath of the 10/7 Hamas attack on Israel, however, has forced the pretending to rise to a level of absurdity that threatens to destabilize the status quo.

As I wrote in a previous Counter-Currents essay:

Hamas’ attack in October against the Israelis has blown a wide hole in American Left-Right, liberal-conservative metapolitics. It has split liberal, Jewish Democrats into hostile camps and exposes Republicans, Jews, and gentiles alike to be cheerleaders for Netanyahu’s current project of ethnic cleansing the Gaza Palestinians.

For much of the outside world, the Israeli Jews are conducting what looks like a military campaign of civilian extermination fueled by hatred for a population they perceive as inferior. This is a particularly bad “Warsaw ghetto” sort of “optic” for a highly touchy people whose claim to perpetual moral superiority and immunity from criticism rests upon the well-traveled, highly-polished imagery of Jewish innocents – women, children and old people – herded into extermination camps by brutal soldiers. What do you imagine might be running through Steven Spielberg’s creative mind these days as he plans his next Nazi-horror production? Turning the corpses of Gaza toddlers into dead Nazis will require the kind of imagination you can only find in the folks running Hollywood.

How then to pretend that the Jews, engaged in this particularly ugly business of turning Gaza into the world’s largest crematorium, are to maintain their coveted status as the world’s most celebrated victims of murderous racism?

The Platter’s third verse give us a clue:

Yes, I’m the great pretender
Just laughin’ and gay like a clown
I seem to be what I’m not, you see . . .

No one is laughing, but what the world is seeing in Gaza is the aggressors pretending to be what they are not, that is, victims. Nevertheless, it’s turning out to be a tough sell and puts undo stress on the Jewish monopoly on ethnic victimhood.

The United Nations, in all its vainglorious, impotent uselessness has passed eight General Assembly resolutions condemning Israeli aggression. For this beacon of democracy in the Middle East, how could this this not be a great affront? The uncouth General Assembly members have failed to respect the victimhood monopoly.

From UN Watch:

“The U.N.’s assault on Israel with a torrent of one-sided resolutions, just one month after the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and on the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, is surreal,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based non-governmental watchdog organization [established in 1993 by legendary civil rights activist Morris B. Abram, the former U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva].

This has that distinctly whinny, aggrieved tone perfected by Zionists when someone calls out their depredations, a cry of lese-majesty against those who would dare to impugn the character of the chosen people. To divert the attention of those UN members away from current events in Israel and the IDF incursions, let’s focus on what’s much more important: a night eight-five years ago and a reminder of Kristallnacht. Don’t they know about the “Holocaust”?

Luckily for Israel, “the U.N.’s assault” leaves no serious bruises because the U.S. regularly vetoes General Assembly resolutions condemning Israel. That’s probably its most important role at the U.N. Nothing else comes to mind.

The United States [has] responded to the frequent criticism [of Israel] from United Nations organs by adopting the Negroponte doctrine of opposing any UNSC resolutions criticizing Israel that did not also denounce Palestinian militant activity.

This points to the tail-wagging-the-dog, United States-Israeli relationship and another aspect of “I seem to be what I’m not, you see.” The US governing class may seem to be governing in the interest of the American people, but let’s have the Capos speak for themselves as to who is pulling the strings, starting at the top.

President Joe Biden: “You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist. And I am a Zionist.”

Here is former Democrat, Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi: “US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday called Israel’s creation the ‘greatest political achievement of the 20th century’, in a speech to the Israeli parliament.” Why is an American legislator prostrating herself before a foreign parliament?

Here is the current Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, after a recent tour of the Golan Heights: “You hear in the US about how the Palestinians or the Arab people are oppressed in these areas, and have these terrible lives. None of that is true. We didn’t see any of it.”

Apparently, “Potemkin” is not in the Congressman’s vocabulary.

Here is how Mike Johnson earns his campaign money:

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, was the top donor to Rep. Mike Johnson during his most recent campaign, chipping in $25,000 between 2021 and 2022, according to an OpenSecrets analysis of his political contributors. Johnson’s first order of business as speaker of the House is to seek budget cuts in exchange for a $14 billion aid package for Israel.

The purchase of the US Congress by AIPAC, as I noted in a previous post, was copiously detailed by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. Mearsheimer himself discovered personally that any congressman who entertains the notion that the interest of Israel should not be the American government’s highest priority will be marked by the DC establishment as an anti-Semite.

Israeli ownership of American politicians is a forbidden topic, a fact we have to pretend does not exist. Thus, since the 10/7 Hamas attack, “anti-Semitism” has pushed “systemic racism” and black victimhood to the back burner as a guilt trigger for anti-white policies. It gives American politicians moral cover to send the Israelis more weapons and American tax-payer money and to proclaim their undying devotion to Israel. It also serves as a weapon to punish sympathizers for the Palestinians and to keep a firm grip their exalted victimhood status that always comes with the specter of another Auschwitz on the near horizon.

Pushing the “anti-Semitism” envelope in this way, however, is turning out to be a bit tricky, given that the anti-Semites attracting a lot of attention are on Ivy League university campuses protesting and claiming to represent victims of “racism.” They are accusing the Jews of being racist oppressors. But the Jews can’t be oppressors because nobody is more oppressed than the Jews, of which we are constantly reminded. This turns out to be a huge public-relations, image problem for the Jewish-owned American political class. “Racism/Anti-Semitism” has been the regular war cry of the coalition of the oppressed against white Americans. The Gaza mess has fractured that coalition and the Jews, now looking like “racist” white people, are pushing the pedal down hard on “anti-Semitism” because political power in America flows to the oppressed at the top of the pyramid where they are now perched and want to remain.

Now, if you live in a completely pretend world, as do the Republicans and most of the Democrats in the anti-reality regime, then you must work hard to keep the threat of “anti-Semitism” for the public on a full boil. That lets the Jews continue to dissimulate their power and retain their cherished victimhood. You put on performances, mini-show trials, that feature “suspects” in positions of influence exerting insufficient efforts to repress the unhinged anti-Semites in their orbits. “Hate [is supposed to have] no home in the Ivys.”

Hauling three Ivy League university presidents before a US House Committee on Anti-Semitism on Campuses early this month is how this is done, and it showed just what the Israeli pay-masters expect from our [sic] Representatives. No? There is no US House Committee on Anti-White Discrimination.

The Grand Inquisitor in this charade was Elise Stefanik, R-NY. To get a sense of where Elise was coming from, on November 2, 2023, “Congresswoman Elise Stefanik joined Fox and Friends to discuss how House Republicans are committed to standing like a rock with our great ally Israel and providing the resources necessary for Israel to defend itself against the Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists.” These “standing like a rock” Republicans never tell us what we, American citizens, are supposed to get from “our great ally Israel” other than feeling virtuous.

Elise’s interrogation of the three lady presidents consisted of “have you stopped beating your wife” style questions like: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct? Yes or no?” How about asking black President of Harvard, Claudine Gay: “Why did you sanction the denaming multiple buildings, including Winthrop House, named after John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his great grandson, also John Winthrop, a Harvard professor and president.? Are you calling for the purge of ‘whiteness’ at Harvard? Yes or no?” No one in this august body even pretends to care about this.

Every aspect of this sorry spectacle presided over by philistines purchased with foreign money was a farce. Most egregious was the presence of the Harvard president, a certified plagiarist whose CV is so feeble, that were she a white male she wouldn’t be hired at Eastern Michigan University. Yet, in spite of this, and a record of staggering administrative incompetence and malfeasance that included defending university policies that discriminated against whites and Asians, she retained her position.

The fate of the three women, post-hearing outcome, highlights the current pecking order of victimhood in “our democracy.” Sally Kornbluth, who is Jewish, gets to stay at MIT. Claudine Gay, outed as an Affirmative Action stooge, still gets a pass for the same reason a moron like Kamala Harris is the Vice President of the United States. Liz Magill of Penn, a white, gentile got the axe. Q.E.D.

If there is any silver lining in these dark clouds, it’s the fracturing of the coalition of the oppressed and the unmasking of “anti-Semitism” as a guilt-weapon the keep white Americans from knowing who is in charge. A final nod to the Platters: “Too real is this feeling of make-believe.”