“A lot of people are feeling relieved, or saying they’re ‘grateful to Admiral Yamamoto’ because there hasn’t been a single air raid. They’re very wrong: the fact that the enemy hasn’t come is no th…
In recent days, the phrase ”Let’s go Brandon!” has taken on a life of its own. At one point, four out of ten songs on the Spotify top 10 list were called ”Let’s go Brandon”. People are saying it as a form of greeting, or wearing it on t-shirts. For some, this is just a funny gag. For others, it is a source of significant and growing dread; dread about what is happening politically in the United States, and what the future now looks to have in store for them.
But even with all this said, many a reader will probably want to ask a simple question: why does any of this matter? Though I would argue that the sudden explosion of ”Let’s go Brandon!” in American culture actually means a very great deal, to truly explain why this joke is so funny to some, and so unnerving to others, we have to do so by way of a metaphor. To truly understand why many liberals are so scared of what others consider to still be merely a harmless joke, we have to talk a bit about a concept known as Kantai Kessen, the Japanese naval war doctrine during World War II. Do not worry, the relevance of this concept to today’s America will hopefully become clear as we go along.
This is the runup to Pearl Harbor. Not long before the attack itself, the Japanese have invaded China yet again, in order to carve out even more ”meat” for themselves. While all imperialists come up with various pretexts to justify their actions, the Japanese truly do believe (and for quite good reason, given the fate of their neighbors in Asia) that they must never become weak enough for others to push them around like Commodore Perry once did. As a response to this latest bout of japanese expansionism, the US then begins embargoing oil shipments to Japan. Without that oil, Japan will figuratively and literally starve. The Japanese are not about to voluntarily dismantle their own empire and leave themselves to rely on the kindness of America – the weak are meat, and the strong eat, after all. Guided by this national logic, Japan then must attack, and it must attack soon.
As such, the Japanese put their unlikely hopes of prevailing over the Americans in the idea of forcing a ”decisive battle”, a fight where the utter inferiority of Japan in a long-term struggle hopefully won’t have time to matter. To brutally simplify the Japanese military thinking behind this doctrine, the Japanese hope at the start of the war is to attack Pearl Harbor and do as much damage as possible to the unprepared Americans, to tilt the odds in the short term heavily in their favor. Then, the Japanese hope that the Americans will be so enraged at this surprise attack that they fairly quickly gather what forces they have lying around and send them to battle against the IJN, which will destroy the less trained and technically inferior American force in detail. At this point, after having sustained heavy casualties in one large set piece battle, the Japanese hope the Americans will simply conclude that fighting with Japan is just too much trouble for too little reward, and agree to simply leave Japan alone to do as she wants in southeast Asia.
It should be noted that many people inside the Japanese high command think this plan will never work. But nobody can actually come up with a better idea; this method of forcing a large, decisive battle and then having the Americans agree to call the match there is the only way a war against the US can succeed.
At first, the democrats cheered, seeing this orange clown as easy prey for their putatively ”impressive” candidate, Hillary Clinton. But then Clinton lost, and this unlikely orange tribune of the deplorables became the most powerful person in the world. Large parts of the republican establishment refused to accept what had happened; the credentialed classes of America, almost to the last genderfluid xhe/xhim, violently refused to accept it. From day one, the election was widely seen as illegitimate, a result of ”Russian interference”, and at every turn, the Trump administration was met with bitter resistance from all corners of the media, the deep state, and the NGO world.
By mid-2020, it was clear that no one in America’s ”email job caste” would accept Trump winning another election. And from the death of George Floyd, until the aftermath of January the 6th, the email job caste of America put their own doctrine of Kantai Kessen into action. They gathered their strength and prepared for a mighty showdown, looking to strike such a ringing blow against the intruding plebeians and flyover deplorables that they would simply never be able to even think of fighting back again.
And just like the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, they succeeded. The overwhelming power behind this mighty fusion of media power, corporate buy-in, limitless NGO money, radical activists taking the battle to the streets, and constant political backup from the Democratic party and various state legislatures, city mayors and state governors was laid bare for the entire world to see. The social media companies banned the sitting president from having a platform, and censored stories (such as the Hunter Biden laptop) that were potentially harmful to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ chances.
Every sector of America’s ”knowledge worker” caste came together from the middle of 2020 up to the election and into its aftermath. Every single one. And it worked, in fact it worked perfectly – Joe Biden was, after a few interrupted vote counts here and there, hailed as the single most popular president in American history. Nobody could dispute this, and the sorry people who did (if they could even be called ”people” at all) were swiftly denounced as terrorists and traitors to the nation. The vote totals spoke for themselves, after all! In other words, the ”woke” really did it; they scored a perfect victory, just as the Japanese scored a perfect victory at Pearl Harbor. In 2016, the ”forgotten people” of America had, incredibly, used the power of their votes to narrowly push Trump over the finish line. In 2020, the very much not forgotten people of America’s urban cores and prestige institutions gathered all their might and routed the deplorables from the field.
Or so they hoped. It turns out that the liberal Kantai Kessen suffered from the same fatal flaw as the Japanese one: it is all well and good to sink all the ships in Pearl Harbor, but what do you do if the enemy then refuses to concede defeat? The significance of ”Let’s go Brandon!” spreading like wildfire outside the jaded internet set in this context is that it reveals for everyone just how powerless the media machine has now become. Nobody believes Joe Biden is the most popular president ever – nobody among the ”chuds” and the ”deplorables” would believe the likes of CNN about pretty much anything. And rather than being humiliated and broken, the American plebs are now acting just like the American sailors and soldiers did during World War 2: though none can deny that they have lost some battles and suffered real losses, surrender doesn’t seem to be forthcoming any time soon. Maybe surrender isn’t coming at all, ever. The ”decisive battle” that was the 2020 election was indeed decisive enough, but it increasingly looks like that simply doesn’t matter.
And here we come to the real imbalance in the class war that currently rages in America, because it is now clearly very much a war between a great many people who have ”email jobs”, and the people who have jobs that keep the lights on, the garbage from piling up, that make sure that the fires are extinguished and the planes are flown. This imbalance of power is in some sense even more crippling than the one between Japan and America in World War 2, and one only needs to look at the growing number of empty shelves in America’s supermarkets, the stranded planes in her airports, and the growing mountains of garbage piling up on the streets of New York to see why.
In the conflict between the ”woke” and the ”deplorables”, the latter by and large work the kind of jobs where if people walk off the job, it takes days or even hours before one or more critical parts of modern society starts shutting down. If pilots call in sick, planes simply do not get flown. If truckers quit their jobs, every facet of the entire productive economy – from the smallest bakery to the biggest car manufacturer – will quickly become paralyzed and then starts to suffocate. If firemen refuse to go to work, the cities will quite literally burn down in short order.
But what happens if people at the average NGO stop showing up to work? What happens if an university professor in critical gender studies refuses to come into the office until this or that issue is solved? How many months or years will it take for the average citizen in flyover America to notice that this person is missing? And when they finally do notice that some gender commissar is refusing to show up at work, will they even care?
Here, the average member of America’s credentialed classes might point out how ridiculous such an argument is, that only a philistine, a luddite or a white supremacist would consider their jobs within academia, the media, and middle management to be useless. These jobs are really completely vital to a modern economy, and the fact that I even dare to question their necessity makes me a racist, a nazi, and a white supremacist. And maybe this is all true, but it actually doesn’t matter. I could be be the mongolian reincarnation of Adolf Hitler himself, but this will not change the fact that the guy who handles garbage collection is simply much, much more willing and able to go for long stretches without the oh-so-necessary Critical Race Theory commissars, than these commissar are able or willing to go without any garbage pickup. The HR manager might be ”just as important” as the truck driver on the level of platonic forms, but the truck driver is still willing and able to carry on forever without the HR manager showing up to work, while the HR manager will quite literally start starving to death in short order if the trucker doesn’t do his job. No moral hectoring or impotent crying about racism and white supremacy will ever change that basic imbalance between these two groups.
In 2020, the HR manager and CRT commissar pulled off their own little Pearl Harbor attack on the trucker and the pilot, and it was a very well-executed attack. All the targets were hit, all the objectives fulfilled. But when the trucker now refuses to go to work over Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates, and the pilot openly mocks the power and legitimacy of the media and the credentialed classes over his airplane intercom, the utter hopelessness of the woke position is increasingly made manifest. They had hoped for a decisive battle, after which the ”forgotten people” would go back to being forgotten. Instead, the email job caste of America now finds itself locked into a hopeless conflict against people whose work and toil they rely on, but who do not need them to anything close to the same degree. The media has failed at controlling the narrative or shaping public opinion, but there’s no more media that can be used. Censorship on social media platforms has failed to stop the spread of forbidden thought and subversive opinion, but there aren’t any big platforms left that didn’t partake in some way in 2020. The email job caste has almost exhausted all the tools in their arsenal, and the more traditional means of tyranny – such as sending in the armed forces – are clearly incredibly dangerous to use, given the demographics of the lower ranks of the armed forces. The power that’s been used thus far has not been enough, but it’s increasingly unclear where the email job caste will get more power from.
