Power and Distraction

Is DC really "just a distraction?"

I play a lot of chess. I’m okay at it, in that most average to novice players I can probably beat. But to get to this point, I played horribly for about twenty years. Over the last 10 years or so, I’ve managed to level up my skillset. I did that by learning how to create a distraction. Sure, I’d read books and used online resources to discover different openings and responses (of which I particularly love the Reti), and those are great. But at some point, chess degenerates into poker, as does anything involving people pitted one against another.

This is something a lot of us don’t get.

Let me tie back, then. So right now, people (including me) are calling the federal takeover of DC a “distraction.” I say that, although I know people who live in the city, they won’t see troops walking in their streets as a distraction. That will very quickly consume all of their thoughts, because the number of bad scenarios that can come out of that is nearly infinite, and outpaces the good by orders of magnitude. Still, I call it a distraction from Epstein. Why?

It’s because of the nature of power. You see, there’s not a damn thing most of us in the United States can do about the DC takeover. That’s just a fact. The precinct is controlled by the federal government anyway. It would take an act of Congress to rein Trump in there, and we all know that there are few Republicans left in Congress with backbones. So we’re being handed something we can fume over, but not do much else about. And you know what else? Trump has vilified big cities generally, and DC and LA in particular, to such an extent that his base, the core of all his power, doesn’t care about boots on the ground there.

You know what his base do care about?

Epstein.

So let’s play this out. Assume we all pivot and start staring at and talking about troops in the streets of DC. What does that do for us? Does it get Trump out of power? Nope. All it does is sucks oxygen from the rooms in which we could be talking about literally almost anything else and have a more meaningful impact.

But, suppose we keep beating the Epstein drum. This is an issue that has divided the MAGA movement in some significant ways. The part of MAGA that started with QANON is all about those files, come hell or high water. The other part, consisting mainly of Trump fanbois is desperately trying to move everyone on to the next distraction. If they succeed, then they might be able to silence the QANON MAGA, and Trump can once again consolidate control of his base. But we already know that Trump will never release more than he’s forced to. So this is going to be a long and drawn-out battle to get the Epstein files, and at each step, more QANON MAGA will wonder why the hell it’s taking so long. This chips away at his base and diminishes his power.

Bringing it back to Chess, sometimes I attack on the Queen side when I’ve got pieces staged on the King’s side, planning for 4 or 5 moves from then. This causes my adversary to shift their pieces, and they forget about what I’m doing on the King’s side, allowing me, in many cases, to execute tactical wins. To summarize, attack one direction with an expendable force, and then once the enemy has positioned against that threat, move in on the other side. If I have a weakness, then I might also attack so that resources are pulled from focusing on exploiting my weakness, and instead on thwarting my attack.

In this life, public attention is all of the chess pieces. If the focus is on something (like Epstein) that is a very weak point for the administration, then do something like, I don’t know, occupy DC, so that people now shift to talk about that. If we do shift, then the trick worked. And it’s worth not shifting, even if people in DC have to deal with troops in their streets. Why?

Because, unlike chess, there’s no other game queued up. We don’t get to have a redo if we fail to weaken Trump’s regime. So even if it hurts, we have to focus on what has an impact instead of what doesn’t. We can rage all we want, but at the end of the day, if our expressed rage doesn’t move the needle or diminish our opponent’s power, then it’s pointless showboating.

So yes. DC is a distraction.

And it sucks.

But that’s where we are.