Submitted by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog, [21]
I wrote the first three parts of this article back in September and planned to finish it in early October, but life intervened and truthfully I don’t think I was ready to confront how bad things will likely get as this Fourth Turning moves into the violent, chaotic war stage just over the horizon.
The developments in the Middle East, Europe, U.S., China and across the globe in the last months have confirmed my belief war drums are beating louder, global war beckons, and much bloodshed will be the result. Fourth Turnings proceed at their own pace within the 20 to 25 year crisis framework, but there is one guarantee – they never de-intensify as they progress. Just as Winter gets colder, stormier and more bitter as you proceed from December through February, Fourth Turnings get nastier, grimmer, more perilous, with our way of life hanging in the balance.
In Part 1 [22] of this article I discussed the catalyst spark which ignited this Fourth Turning [23] and the seemingly delayed regeneracy. In Part 2 [24] I pondered possible Grey Champion prophet generation leaders who could arise during the regeneracy. In Part 3 [25] I focused on the economic channel of distress which is likely to be the primary driving force in the next phase of this Crisis. In Part 4 I will assess the social and cultural channels of distress dividing the nation, Part 5 the technological, ecological, political, military channels of distress likely to burst forth with the molten ingredients of this Fourth Turning [23], and finally in Part 6 our rendezvous with destiny, with potential climaxes to this Winter of our discontent.
The road ahead will be distressful for everyone living in the U.S., as we experience the horrors of war, economic collapse, civil chaos, political upheaval, and the tearing of society’s social fabric. The pain and suffering being experienced across the globe today will not bypass the people of the United States. Winter has arrived and lethal storms are gathering in the distance. Don’t think you can escape. You can prepare, but this Crisis will reshape our society for better or worse, and you cannot sidestep the consequences or cruel environment we must survive.
“Reflect on what happens when a terrible winter blizzard strikes. You hear the weather warning but probably fail to act on it. The sky darkens. Then the storm hits with full fury, and the air is a howling whiteness. One by one, your links to the machine age break down. Electricity flickers out, cutting off the TV. Batteries fade, cutting off the radio. Phones go dead. Roads become impossible, and cars get stuck. Food supplies dwindle. Day to day vestiges of modern civilization – bank machines, mutual funds, mass retailers, computers, satellites, airplanes, governments – all recede into irrelevance. Picture yourself and your loved ones in the midst of a howling blizzard that lasts several years. Think about what you would need, who could help you, and why your fate might matter to anybody other than yourself. That is how to plan for a saecular winter. Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning [23]
Social Distress
The vast and growing Grand Canyon sized gap between the haves and have nots, and the societal implications of an elitist uber-wealthy minority capturing the levers of our economic, financial, and political systems, using that control to further enrich themselves at the expense of the isolated working class, can be clearly understood by following the dialogue between three billionaires chatting on stage at a conference thrown by a convicted Wall Street criminal.
Sheryl Sandberg: “Yeah, so let’s follow up on a bunch of the things we were talking about. Let’s start with income inequality.”
Hank Paulson: “Ok, well.. income inequality. I think this is something we’ve all thought about. You know I was working on that topic when I was still at Goldman Sachs..”
Robert Rubin: “In which direction? You were working on increasing it.”
Hank Paulson then bursts out laughing: “Yeah! We were making it wider!”
Paulson and Rubin spent vast portions of their lives working for the vampire squid on the face of America – Goldman Sachs. This firm represents everything wrong with our social order, as they use all means (legal or illegal) to enrich themselves, whether it be back stabbing clients, double crossing partners, eviscerating vulnerable competitors, robbing the poor, rigging markets, buying influence, placing executives in the highest levels of government, or screwing the taxpayer when their risky gambles blow up the world. Paulson and Rubin are the perfect representatives of the .1% ruling class who protect their interests and the interests of their crony capitalist colleagues at all costs. They truly believe they are shrewder, more astute, cleverer, deserving of the billions they have absconded through rigging the markets, should be running the country behind the scenes, and merit the worship of the lowly peasantry.
The gap between the richest 1% and the bottom 90% has never been wider in history. The previous largest gap occurred in 1929, at the start of the last Fourth Turning [23]. When the real median household income hasn’t advanced in the last 26 years and men’s real wages are where they were in 1971, while CEOs of S&P 500 companies make 331 times their workers and Wall Street hedge fund managers make billions while paying no taxes, you have building anger, disillusionment and calls for retribution.
Some people are waking up to the fact the Ben Bernanke led Federal Reserve and the Hank Paulson/Tim Geithner led Treasury saved their buddies on Wall Street while throwing the people on Main Street under the bus. When Wall Street’s leveraged risk bets pay off, they reap all the riches – as is happening today. When their colossal wagers go bad, the propaganda about systematic failure is rolled out and the American people are stuck with the losses. The goal has always been to revive the stock market and make sure the Wall Street banks continue to generate billions in profits, while leaving the taxpayer on the hook for their failed bets.
The OWS and Tea Party were both grass roots initiated movements as a societal response to the distress created by Wall Street and their government crony cohorts. The Wall Street banks colluded with DHS and captured politicians of both parties to crush OWS and subvert the Tea Party. The Deep State’s success in squashing dissent from what they considered the lowly peasants has only been temporarily papered over by the $10 trillion of debt issued to keep the masses sedated, deluded and ignorant about the true nature of the ongoing crisis. The storyline about the 1% is misleading, as many people in the 1% are small business owners, doctors, and professional workers. The true story is the exponential wealth increase of the .1% over the last 35 years as the financialization of the economy has enriched psychopathic, highly educated men who produce nothing but misery, debt, and ultimately social unrest.
Decomposing the 1% reveals the top .1% increasing their share of the national wealth from less than 9% in 1980 to over 21% today. These are the corporate CEO’s buying back their company stock at all-time highs in order to boost their stock based compensation, Wall Street executives who committed the largest control fraud in world history while unabashedly flaunting laws & regulations, hedge fund managers who manipulate and rig the markets while paying no taxes on their billion dollar profits, and billionaire cronies who profit from the military industrial complex and sick care complex by paying off politicians to write laws in their favor and funnel government contracts to them. The sacking and pillaging of the nation’s wealth by psychopaths who are never satisfied with their current vast level of riches, power and control, exposes itself in the tremendous recovery on Wall Street and the ongoing depression on Main Street.
A simmering rage is bubbling below the surface as 20% of American households rely on food stamps to survive, the percentage of Americans in the labor force stands at a four decade low, real household income remains stagnant at 1988 levels, corporate profits have reached record levels while corporations continue to fire Americans – shipping their jobs overseas, and the six mega-corporations representing the mainstream media cover up the truth, mislead the public with propaganda, while celebrating the .1% as saviors of our economy. There is nothing more volatile to societal stability than millions of unemployed men, growing angry and resentful towards the ruling class for their lot in life.
The vast gulf between the haves and have nots will fuel further violence between the classes, as our fraying society is already seething with anger between races, religions, political parties, and genders. The increasingly brutal police state, militarization of local police forces, shaking down of citizens through fines, and unlawful surveillance of our electronic communications, will lead to a backlash against police.
The Black Lives Matter movement, begun after a number of police brutality incidents against black men, has been hijacked by politically motived race baiters and is exacerbating tensions between blacks and whites. The false storyline perpetuated by the media disregards the fact blacks, who represent 13% of the population, commit 22% of all violent crimes and 93% of black shooting victims are shot by other blacks. The white population, abiding by laws, is getting sick of being blamed for the gun violence and lawlessness in liberal ghetto bastions like Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis and Philadelphia.
Cultural Distress
Even though the vast majority of gun related crimes happen in urban ghettos and the much publicized mass shootings are committed by mentally deranged young men on psychotropic drugs, liberal control freak politicians use scare tactics and misinformation in their effort to grab the guns of law abiding Americans living in rural regions. It is the elitist hypocrite politicians living on the coasts, protected by armed guards, who want to eviscerate the 2nd Amendment, and think it is fine for the 4th Amendment to be disregarded by police thugs across the land. Disarming the citizenry is essential to implementing a dictatorial regime. The race wars have intensified, as the Black Lives Matter meme has spread to college campuses in Missouri and in the hallowed Ivy League at Yale and Princeton.
The bullying tactics of the pampered participation trophy generation of entitled millennials, being misled by social justice warrior ideologues, is fueling a backlash by older generations who studied, worked hard, obtained useful college degrees, repaid their student loans, and didn’t use race, gender, or micro-aggressions as excuses when they failed. College campuses, which once championed free speech and free thought, have now become bastions of censorship, left wing ideology, suppression of opinion, shouting down of dissent, thought control, and subduing the rights of the majority for the benefit of an outraged minority who resort to violent rhetoric to achieve their outcomes.
Institutions of higher education have become nothing more than glorified daycare centers for kids who never grew up, learned personal responsibility, or developed critical thinking skills. The feckless college faculty and administrators have allowed financial considerations to override learning, as the curriculum has been dumbed down to meet the degraded capabilities of their high self-esteem/low intelligence students. The reality of an increasingly brutal economic environment and high likelihood of war is about to crash headlong into the coddled, pampered, parent protected, iGadget, facebook worlds of millions of millennials.
They will be nothing but cannon fodder for the Deep State unless they develop a backbone, start thinking critically about what is happening in this world, start dealing with reality, stop trusting the government to save them, and make a stand against the corporate fascist tyranny consuming our nation. The Peter Pan Syndrome, where people with the body of an adult but the mind of a child, increasingly dominate the landscape, as a larger number of supposed adults exhibit emotionally immature behaviors. The self-neutering of young men is the result of twelve years of feminist social engineering in government controlled public schools. The wussificiation is complete.
The combination of social justice warriors, pushing agendas completely out of step with mainstream Americans, and a dying legacy media providing infotainment disguised as news, fuels further cultural distress from coast to coast. With liberalism rampant and dominant on the coasts and conservatism governing the heartland, the cultural divide in the country is a gaping chasm. Average Americans trying to live their lives, pay their bills, and raise families have no strong opinions about gay marriage, men dressing like women, or other deviant behavior performed by consenting adults in the privacy of their own households. But when the liberal media, social justice warriors, and Hollywood elites shove the “right” to gay marriage, the crucifying of people for their religious beliefs, the “courage” of a man pretending to be a woman, and the glorification of abhorrent behavior, down the throats of Americans trying to mind their own business, an unforeseen backlash is inevitable.
The war on the traditional family unit, white males, societal norms, common decency, and community standards has gone too far and the pushback from common decent middle class folks has begun. It is a proven fact that households with married parents are on average wealthier, raise kids who do better in school, can withstand economic setbacks better, and have been the backbone of this country since its inception. The feminist belief that women can raise children without men has proven to be a disaster.
With the percentage of married households plunging from over 70% in 1970 to under 50% today, an ominous tipping point has been reached. Rather than address this truly disastrous problem, the radical feminists and race baiters carry on their culture wars. The social justice warriors, prodded by the liberal media and agenda driven ideologues, are offended by free speech, white people, men, married couples, religious freedom, having to repay loans, gun owners, capitalism, carbon dioxide, meat, yoga and anyone who dares to disagree with their antagonistic, bombastic, vacuous nonsense.
Shockingly, they aren’t offended by the tattooed, pierced freaks roaming the streets, angry because no one will hire them. They aren’t offended by the millions of willfully ignorant, low class army of lazy Obama voters who feel entitled to free housing, free medical care, free food, free phones, and free education at the expense of the working middle class. They aren’t offended by the 70% of black babies born out of wedlock and black men shirking their responsibilities as fathers. They aren’t offended by the rampant criminality and murder rates in the Democrat controlled urban ghettos, created by the welfare policies implemented over the last 50 years.
They aren’t offended by 93% of black murders being committed by blacks. They aren’t offended by a president droning wedding parties and bombing hospitals, while fighting undeclared wars in foreign lands. They aren’t offended by the widespread Medicare, SSDI, and food stamp fraud, costing taxpayers billions per year. Normal people living normal lives are sick and tired of the hypocritical, hollow horseshit rubbed in their faces by a dying legacy media and agenda driven social networks on a daily basis. The foolishness and lunacy of these feckless feeble minded warriors against normalcy will be exposed when confronted by the harsh reality of a Fourth Turning [23].
The rise of Donald Trump and Ben Carson in the early polls for Republican presidential candidate is being fueled by a rising anger and discontent with the corporate media promoting offensive social agendas, the flaunting of the Constitution by a president ruling by executive order, a GOP establishment corrupted by power and unanswerable to their constituents, the disinterest of politicians in both parties in securing our porous southern borders from foreign invasion by illegal hordes. Now the repercussions of Obama ignoring the threats of Islamic extremism and allowing tens of thousands of undocumented Syrian refugees to flood into the country immediately overwhelming our insolvent welfare system and refusing to assimilate into our culture as they worship at mosques where they are taught to hate everything about American culture, is further fueling a political backlash.
As Aldous Huxley realized six decades ago, the truth is unimportant to those controlling the “free” press and shallow distractions will keep the masses occupied while the controllers achieve their goals.
“In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies — the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” – Aldous Huxley, 1958, in the article The Capitalist Free Press [26]
The media will use their standard propaganda techniques of showing crying women and children to tug at the heartstrings of a naïve, unaware populace to allow refugees from a conflict created by the U.S. in Syria to come into our country. You know the tired rhetoric – give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. But this is a Fourth Turning [23] where the harsh reality crashes headlong into rhetoric, memes, and storylines.
Whether the U.S. government is responsible or not for creating the wave of Islamic radicals practicing their warped religious beliefs across the globe by committing murder against innocent people, the fact remains that only Muslims are waging this war against non-believers. There are no Catholics, Baptists, Lutherans, Jews, Buddhists, or atheists spreading their religious beliefs by committing acts of terror or waging war. A religious war is brewing and the consequences will be far reaching and bloody for those practicing Islam. There may be only a small minority of radical jihadists, but the silence of the majority speaks volumes to non-Muslims around the world.
As this Fourth Turning [23] continues to intensify, the bowing down to political correctness and agendas of social justice warrior bigots by traditional minded Americans is going to stop. The pushback may be violent, as the aggressive tactics of these free speech hating fascists is met with armed confrontation they aren’t anticipating. These “warriors” aren’t exactly the Hero generation who did the heavy lifting during the last Fourth Turning [23]. Privileged, entitled, ignorant millennials bullying weak kneed college professors and milquetoast administrators on the campuses of liberal arts colleges isn’t exactly storming the beaches of Normandy or battling through the jungles on Guadalcanal.
When confronted with Americans who have seen their standard of living falling for the last twenty five years and are sick and tired of hearing drivel about white privilege, black lives matter, safe spaces, gay and transgender “rights”, micro-aggressions, rape culture, misogyny, $15 minimum wage, and a myriad of other offenses against feminism, these easily offended “warriors” will piss their pants. These trivialities will seem so quaint when they are confronted with an angry guy with a gun on the streets or when they are told to report for duty as we wage war with Russia and China. The foolishness of the culture wars will become strikingly apparent when economic collapse and life or death choices confront our special snowflake generation.
