The Mafia remains a fixture of American movies and television, long after the peak of its power.
That’s because for a span of 50 years in the early-to-late 20th century, the mob exerted tremendous influence – not just on the street – but in unions, legitimate businesses, and even government. The mark it left on the culture has been a long time wearing off.
As a result of Hollywood movies, the image most people have of mobsters is of suave yet brutal leg-breaking thugs. But random, extreme violence is no way to run a business. In their heyday, gangsters would use force only when necessary to make a point – and an example. If all your marks are dead, or if the cops get involved, you don’t get paid.
So a major factor in the mob’s downfall was the emergence of upstarts within and new competitors without who disdained the old ways. The drug-fueled chaos of the 70s and 80s spilled into the general populace, leading to louder calls for government crackdowns.
But nature abhors a vacuum. Somebody had to fill the power gap left by organized crime’s decline. In what may or may not be an ironic twist, depending on your outlook, that vacuum came to be filled by the same feds who’d helped take the crime families down.
You can get the dirt on Joe Kennedy and Operation Mongoose on any Boomer-tier conspiracy site. We’ll set past collaborations between the government and the old mob aside and focus on the real inflection point that led to our current situation. That was Bill Clinton’s election as president in 1992.
Clinton had run Arkansas like the dirty sheriff of a backwater hick town. He and his organization brought southern crooked cop politics to DC, and everybody in the place has been on the take ever since.
If you doubt me, recall that loan sharking has ever been the mob’s calling card. It’s a steady source of income on the street, far more so at the national level. Whose administration saw the federal government become the single largest holder of student loan debt?
Another bread and butter revenue source for mobsters is extortion. It was the Italian mob who raised the protection racket to an art form. Above and beyond the “Nice store you got here, shame if something was to happen to it” image from pop culture, mafiosi really would protect their extortion victims from other criminals.
Because once again, old school gangsters understood that there’s a right and wrong time and place for violence. Make a habit of dishing out excessive punishment, and sooner or later your marks will learn that the consequences of cooperation and resistance are the same. At that point, they’ll be as likely to go to the cops as they’ll be to pay up.
This is a conundrum our corrupt elites are running into. They favor similar excess cruelty as the cartels that turned Miami Harbor into a bloodbath 40 years ago, but for different reasons. Medellin soldiers wanted to prove they were more ruthless than the competition. It was still business to them. Our rulers, on the other hand, are devotees of a fanatical cult that demands blood sacrifice.
Our elite’s other main point of departure from the old mob is that the latter was driven by hyper-masculinity. In contrast, the Death Cult is characterized by feminine hysteria. The Cult has no code of omerta. Instead, it practices a form of moral extortion to obtain its victims’ compliance.
The transaction is always implicit, but in exoteric terms it goes like this: “We control access to all government, corporate, and entertainment positions. If you want in on the action, you have to mouth this year’s ritual invocations and display fealty to the current sacred cows on demand.”
Case in point: near-billionaire author James Patterson. We last saw him noticing Cult behavior in oldpub and calling it out. If anybody could take the Brandon Sanderson route and tell the cultmob to buzz off, it would be Patterson. Yet here he is performing a 2015 style ritual apology.
As author David V. Stewart points out, the consequences of compliance are approaching parity with the consequences of noncompliance.
One figure that’s remained consistent for decades is that the Death Cult’s active membership ceiling is about 20% of the population. It’s no great revelation that a determined minority can exert outsized influence. The mafia did it for years. Until they no longer could. Which happened when they let greed and wrath get the best of them, leading to a massive public backlash.
Is the ruling Death Cult in for a similar crackdown? Signs such as growing grassroots protests against CRT, infanticide, and child grooming may indicate the affirmative.
In the meantime, the best step you can take – for the sake of your soul, if nothing else – is to stop giving money and attention to Cult media that hate you.
Instead, support creators who want to inform and entertain you.
You might look at Stalin’s regime and ask, “How come random violence works for commies but not for mobsters?” The answer lies in vodka; Russians can tolerate many things as long as they can drink.
Americans have porn and popular culture. We will continue to tolerate death cult tribunals for as long as we will continue to distract ourselves.
The Soviet Union isn’t around anymore. And some people who saw its beginning lived to see its end.
We are to have faith, separate ourselves from Evil, and persevere. No one said we’d be the ones to break the rock — we were only told to keep hammering. Pick up that eight-pounder and keep swingin’!
Reminds me of ZippyCatholic (RIP)
https://zippycatholic.wordpress.com/2015/10/30/where-to-find-me-until-the-orcs-come/
Clinton’s mob tactics are hard to overstate. When the government funded a large craft airstrip in Mena for dubious reasons, a guy we have been assured wasn’t working for the CIA used CIA resources and CIA connected to operate a drug smuggling operation with the airport, and its proximity to I-40, serving as the hub. Some of the earliest cases of Arkancide were people who could have linked this operation to the Clintons. Everyone knew it, too. He lost his first re-election bid to the first Republican to win that office since 1872, when no Democrats were on the ballot (interesting side note: look up the Brooks-Baxter War of 1874).
It’s also worth noting that the Lt. Governor who succeeded him when he was elected president only avoided prison due to his poor health, as he was caught up in the Whitewater scandal.
That’s an interesting connection. Barry Seal, the pilot who admitted to smuggling drugs through the Mena airport, had close ties to George Jung – the highest ranking American in the Medellin Cartel.
Patterson runs an amoral fiction factory full of ghost writers pumping out generic OldPub gruel under his name. He’s not doing it for the art, and now he’s rich off of it. So what is the purpose of any of this? What is he building or growing? What is he promoting? What is he changing? What does he have to lose by going against the mob? Nothing, really. It isn’t just the pop cult that funnels into the death cult, but also the materialistic mammon worshipers who want to continue making dollars they don’t even need while the industry collapses under their feet. I knew he would cuck, because this is the brand he made for himself.
As for Arkansas, I first remember hearing about the Boys on the Tracks and then the case of Norman Ladner from Unsolved Mysteries, basically kids in the backwoods found “suicided” under mysterious circumstances while law enforcement did everything they could to block investigation.
To this day you have people who will bend over backwards to explain away things like killing yourself with your own hunting rifle with bullets you don’t have in a position you can’t do it in, because teenagers are sad sometimes. It’s common to kill yourself with a rifle by pointing it perpendicular with your temple and pulling the trigger. It’s also very common to find radios commonly used by drug dealers hidden in the woods near where your son’s body was found. Happens all the time.
I don’t know when Justice is going to fall on amoral Generation Grift, but it won’t be a moment too soon.
I just watched those Unsolved Mysteries episodes within the last year, but I didn’t make the Clinton connection till just now. Thank you.
Another case like this came up recently. Someone connected to the Clinton administration apparently both hung himself and shot himself with a shotgun. Naturally, this death has been ruled a suicide.
I think there’s something truly evil about staging a murder to look like a suicide. Murder is truly evil all by itself, of course, but this is worse. It’s one thing to know, “This person was murdered.” But when someone kills himself, or when others think he did, that shapes how folks think about him, and their relationship with him. At worst, it is like killing the man’s name along with his body.
It’s also devalued the tragedy of suicide itself and turned it into the equivalent of a meme. I used to go around true crime boards to look some of these cases up and the number of people who argue near-certain murder were suicide because it’s “the most likely explanation” was staggering. They reduced the act to a mere sad person momentarily going insane and killing themselves in the most over the top way possible. It is obvious they don’t know the first thing about it or they wouldn’t swallow that explanation so easily.
This isn’t to say it can’t happen, but people who were ranting and raving about an organization or higher-ups with their hand in the cookie jar are not usually the type to find no meaning in their life and wish to flip the switch off. Yet to modern materialists, this is what the decision amounts to.
This is just all to common nowadays.
The Mafia analogy works well. Especially when we recall the cult doesn’t think in terms of right and wrong, but reward friends, harm enemies. Sometimes to emphasize the malicious religious aspect, I call the moral extortion a rhetorical jizya everyone is expected to pay.
It’s tiresome, but necessary, to tap the sign every time people lose sight of this.
This isn’t the first time that James Patterson sold out. The first (that I know of, anyhow) was when he “co-wrote” that horrible Shadow novel a few years ago (the one that deconstructed the Shadow and turned him into a sidekick for a teenage girl). He probably didn’t do any of the actual writing and just stamped his name on it, but either way, he chose to put his name on a piece of garbage that spit on the legacy of his fellow writer Walter Gibson.
“Turn the most influential pulp hero into a formulaic YA novel filled with modern tropes that we can exploit.”
That’s what they asked him to do, and he complied. No sympathy for him after that point.