A Commentary on the "Change of Needles" between Two State Funerals and Their Respective parallelisms

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State funerals sometimes have the unique potential to capture moments of transition and change.

The historic moment is framed by two key state funerals: that of John McCain on 1 September 2018, and the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II on 19 September 2022.

Consider John McCain, someone with a profile who was awarded the 1999 Profile in Courage Award by the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. The Washington Post covered the state funeral of the Republican candidate who ran against Obama in the 2008 presidential elections, and we could say that symbolically, that funeral represented in the Republican party what has ended up happening in these midterms and which crystallised in an official way on 17 August 2022.

At that moment the loss of Liz Cheney (lawyer and daughter of Dick Cheney, vice president with George W. Bush) in that night's Wisconsin primary made it clear that the majority of House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after 6 January, 8 out of 10, have lost their primaries.

Cheney, who was seeking a fourth term, was defeated by Harriet Hageman, a lawyer and former Cheney supporter whom Trump selected last year as his nominee to oppose her. Cheney's vote in favour of impeaching Trump for inciting the 6 January insurrection, her staunch defence of that vote and her leadership role on the House of Representatives committee investigating the attacks and Trump's actions made her Trump's top political target in the midterm elections.

The Wyoming congresswoman made her opposition to Trump, whom she has repeatedly described as a threat to democracy, a core part of her political identity, and that doomed her to a double-digit defeat in the heavily pro-Trump state.

So there are only two of the 10 Republicans in the House of Representatives who voted to impeach Trump who have a chance of returning to Congress next year. Four lost their primaries (Jaime Lynn Herrera Beutler who serves as U.S. Representative for Washington's 3rd Congressional District. The district includes much of the southwest quadrant of the state, but most voters live on the Washington side of the Portland metropolitan area; Peter James Meijer is an American politician and business analyst who has served as U.S. Representative for Michigan's 3rd Congressional District since 2021; Hugh Thompson Rice Jr. is an American lawyer and politician who serves as U.S. Representative for South Carolina's 7th Congressional District).

Four others opted to retire (Anthony Gonzalez representing Ohio's 16th congressional district; Adam Kinzinger, who claimed that Donald Trump "broke his oath as president and incited insurrection". Kinzinger, an Air Force veteran who has become a leading critic of Trump claiming he "used his position in the executive branch" to attack the legislative branch, served six terms representing northern Illinois; John Katko of New York was the first Republican member of the House of Representatives to say he would vote for impeachment, as a former federal prosecutor he said he had not taken the decision lightly, adding: "Allowing the president of the United States to incite this inconsequential attack is a direct threat to the future of our democracy. I cannot sit by without taking action"; and, Fred Upton of Michigan, said in November that Trump had shown no evidence that his election defeat was the result of widespread fraud. Upton said he would have preferred a partisan impeachment rather than impeachment, but that Trump's refusal to take responsibility for the riots left him no choice. "Congress must hold President Trump accountable and send a clear message," he added.) Two - Reps. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) and David Valadao (R-Calif.) - made it past the electoral cut-off from the all-party primaries.

This underlines two things:

1/ The scale of Donald Trump's control over certain elements of the Republican Party, capable of making 4 of those Representatives resign; and, on the other hand,

2/ It shows clearly that between those who finance the Republican Party and those who support it with their votes, democracy subtracts and the coup d'état adapted to the forms of this stage of the 21st century, which pursues absolutely worrying aspects, sums up.

Recently Donald Trump has presented in Ohio a sort of religious ceremony in the form of an election rally (or vice versa), with the synchronisation of the world that feeds and drives QAnon. The November 2022 congressional elections (and beyond) have positioned someone who has a capacity to exert an influence on Trump's strategic thinking. Trumpism, even without Trump, is a reality since Trump's role is to be a mass agitator, if another "Trump" were necessary, it would be made possible by men like Peter Thiel, who has decided to leave Facebook to focus, as I was saying, not simply on these mid-term congressional elections, but also beyond. He is a Catholic neoconservative, in the same line as Steve Bannon. Trump is, in the words of Russia's own media, Russia's great hope if he regains the White House in 2024, for which it is necessary to control the Senate in the 2022 legislative elections. To this end, the Russian media, and the whole chain of elements and entities dependent on them and/or sympathised by the West, have been heavily involved in the promotion of "My Son Hunter", a film attacking President Joe Biden and his son, which will be distributed by the ultra-right Breitbart media since its release on 7 September 2022.

There are also references to a laptop, supposedly belonging to Hunter Biden, which became the subject of a highly controversial New York Post story with several signs that raise serious doubts about its authenticity.

Evgeny Georgievich Popov (born September 11, 1978, in Vladivostok), the host of the Russian edition of the program 60 минут (60 Minutes), which is broadcast on the Russian state television Россия 1 (Russia 1), and who is also a Russian political figure and since 19 September 2021 is a deputy of the 8th State Duma for the United Russia party (Evgeny Popov won his deputy's seat in the Kuntsevsky single-mandate constituency no. 197 of Moscow by getting 35.17% of the vote, beating Mikhail Lobanov of the Communist Party, who got 31.65%), said in late March 2022 that the Republicans produced the "scandalous" film because they "got tired of waiting for justice". He suggested the film is meant to help them during the midterm elections and called the laptop the main "trump card" of former President Donald Trump.

Evgeny Popov is from 12 October 2021 Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Information Technologies and Communications; from November 2021, Deputy Co-Chairman of the Interparliamentary Group of the Russian Federation. And from January 2022, coordinator of the group on relations between the State Duma of the Russian Federation and the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, according to TASS.

Popov was in Ukraine from 2003 to 2006, covering the events of the Orange Revolution and its aftermath, to which he devoted a great deal of coverage, covering the news for the state broadcaster Russia 1. He returned to Moscow in 2006 to become a political commentator for the Russia 1 state television programme "Vesti nedeli" (Вести недели); he was also editor-in-chief of Vesti nedeli's New York desk from 2008 to 2013, the years of the emergence and rise of the Tea Party as a religious, neoconservative and so called libertarianism platform (which is the DNA of Peter Thiel, Steve Bannon and others). Popov had a salary of between $5-7 thousand per month, in addition, the state television channel pays a full social package, rent for more than decent housing, an expensive car, communications and other expenses. In New York he met his first wife, Anastasia Churkina, who worked in the United States at Russia Today, and who is the daughter of Russia's permanent representative to the United Nations and the UN Security Council, Vitaly Churkin, who died in 2017 and who ably defended Russia's actions in Ukraine and Syria. So his time in New York was fruitful for creating synergies, personal and professional relationships, meeting different people... and also as the husband of a Russia Today journalist, who was the son-in-law of Russia's permanent representative to the United Nations and the UN Security Council.

Popov has always been successful in visiting many hotspots of interest to the Kremlin such as the war in Libya, the Kyiv Maidans of 2003 and 2014, the war in Donbass, and so on.

In 2013 Evgeny Popov married Olga Skabeyeva, one of the most recognisable faces (and voices) of the state media Russia 1. She is known as "the iron doll of Putin's television". The couple have been presenting the Russian version of 6o Minutes since 12 September 2016, and from 24 February 2022 the programme will be released as a special series dedicated to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. They are twice as long and replace entertainment and non-political talk shows in the state channel's broadcasting schedule. For the first time in history, 60 Minutes was also broadcast on Saturday and Sunday. From February 2022, special issues dedicated to events in Ukraine are published from Monday to Friday from 11:30 to 14:00 and from 17:30 to 20:00 before Vesti nedeli is broadcast on air. Additionally, from 14:55 to 17:00, between episodes of Vesti nedeli, another news and political programme is broadcast, Кто против? (Who is against it?), which resumed broadcasting from 3 March 2022 after a two-year break, during which time Putin's speech from Luzhniki on 9 March 2022 on the occasion of the eighth anniversary of the annexation of Crimea was broadcast, in which the President of the Russian Federation spoke about the justifications for declaring war on Ukraine. As you can see, it is as close to a continuous session as you can get.

In the context of the aforementioned 60 Minutes programme at the end of March 2022 to promote the film My Son Hunter, Olga Skabeyeva said: "We are waiting for the premiere and hoping for a big success in the United States, to bring our beloved Trump back to power".

Evgeny Popov created a series of documentaries in which he used fake documents to discredit Alexey Navalny.

As I have explained, the ideas are endlessly repeated, and another seven-minute segment on the statewide television programme Vesti at 20:00 included promotion and clips of Fox host Tucker Carlson and Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, accusing the FBI of "interfering in the election" by not investigating the laptop. Indeed, recall that Trump demanded reinstatement as president or "a new election, immediately" after news that Facebook temporarily limited a controversial story about Hunter Biden's laptop for questionable veracity. Remember that Peter Thiel has left Facebook in February 2022 to help Trump, and remember Facebook's role in certain events that have driven the lines along which Donald Trump is moving, and this is enough to consider the seriousness of such a claim.

Republicans are eager to accelerate Hunter's investigations if they gain control of Congress in November 2022, and whether or not they find solid irregularities, they hope to bind President Joe Biden before the 2024 elections, assuming he chooses to run again.

With the war in Ukraine ongoing and the Biden administration firmly backing Kyiv, Kremlin propagandists have stepped up rhetorical support for Trump, particularly in the wake of an FBI search of his Florida home. Russian state news has repeated far-right talking points in the US. Like prominent far-right figures, Kremlin spokesmen have suggested that the raid could trigger a civil war in the US.

What is also interesting to note is the way in which these ideological positions are connected with the cultural discourse aimed at reversing the status quo and preparing a republican domination with less social support for the destiny of the United States, including the economic, social and capitalist model aspects, and a wide etcetera, which are shared by the Russian counterpart, and which seek to isolate the United States as a cosmopolitan power, in harmony with the wishes of China. ... in fact, in the world games are played on different axes, and what pits some against others in a context prepares the understanding with them according to the interests of parts of the American, Russian, German, French, Italian or whatever establishment.

The fundamentalist right in the United States has thus been extending its crusade to Europe by funding lobbies in Brussels. Specifically, six US organisations allocated 17.2 million between 2012 and 2017 to subsidiaries and entities with pro-life and anti-feminist agendas in the EU, and the links of the network, whose main obsession is abortion, include figures close to Trump, military contractors and conservative millionaires. The other end of the coffers is in Russia, as two Russian oligarchs are showering their fortunes on the anti-feminist movement in Europe, according to a report by the European Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights, which credits entities owned by oligarchs Vladimir Yakunin and Konstantin Malofeev with spending more than $170 million on "anti-gender" activism. In addition, for example, Malofeev is listed as being linked to a patron of Citizen Go, a foundation with multiple ties to Vox (Spanish Party). For more information on this, I recommend reading the following article, and this other article. Similarly, the hacked emails show how the US-led World Congress of Families promoted Russian political interests in Europe while offering Russian Orthodox oligarchs an entry point to US-based evangelical Christian networks.

In this regard, and to conclude this point, it is worth putting the recent "alternative news media" report on the alleged RAND report on the right lines. Several things are striking about this "leak":

1/ The original source does not exist: at most, a supposed "leak to a Swedish media" (?) that would have published it.

2/ The only media that report on this are those with links to the Kremlin and also disseminate Chinese propaganda in a subsidiary way, such as The Saker.

3/ The only thing that can be found at the end of the supposed original report is a manipulation, and a badly done one at that: it includes the RAND logo and copyright on the first page, but it does not coincide at all with one of RAND's reports, neither the typography nor the organisational structure, nor other formal and visual details, as I will prove below.

Here is a RAND document.

And here are the screenshots of the alleged document:

4/ So what is it? Well, it is Russian propaganda with claims that have no basis in fact, and which coincide exactly with Russia's strategic narratives: the United States planned the war, the United States wants to weaken Germany and the whole of Europe, the German government is unreliable, the light is going to go off to ruin Europe, etcetera.

5/ Such things, if true, are not designed at RAND and published on such a piece of paper. It is studied and prepared in various other agencies and has a different category of secrecy.

What is happening is that Europe is paying for the design of Franco-German Europe, with the connections between the German and Russian establishments, the lust for domination of Germany and France, a monetary union but no fiscal or banking union because it has not suited Germany, with France and Germany with a win-win agreement but then Germany getting its way whenever it can; a refusal of any federal structure because it has not suited Germany either, a failure in the field of disruptive technology, a plummeting quality of European Universities and a world in which energy and technology play a vital role and in which Europe, Germany and increasingly France are dependent for gas or uranium and technology on Russia and its master China. The United States has a position on such elements, in other things it has got it very wrong, but China is hammering on key issues. Europe, by Germany's design to suit its interests, has brought this about. It is not the United States that is to blame, the culprits and the culprits are to be found here, with Russia and China.

Here it is important to differentiate between those who do it for free and those who get paid for it. The Insider published the following list of the 13 highest paid Kremlin propagandists in 2020, with Popov and Skabeyeva in seventh and eighth place respectively. Olga Skabeeva received 12.8 million roubles, two hundred thousand roubles more than the official salary of Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, who is paid 12.6 million roubles. At the time, Yevgeny Popov had an annual income of 12.9 million roubles. The income, like his wife's, comes from two sources: payments from the Russian TV channel Russia, as well as his wholly state-owned parent company VGTRK, and real estate in Moscow worth 300 million roubles, according to the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF or FBK, from the Russian: ФБК, Фонд борьбы с коррупцией), by Alexei Navalny, in information published on 29 July 2021.

In the end, these aspects, as I explained here recently, were to be expected and are part of Russia's strategy for the coming months aimed at Germany and France, and other elements of the European Union, as I anticipated.

The other state funeral that marks our time, as I said, is that of Queen Elizabeth II. Let us look at the funeral of King Edward VII in 1910, as Barbara Tuchman rightly reflects in The Guns of August:

So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens–four dowager and three regnant–and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.

Indeed, this moment and its understanding requires the reading of the following document that I wrote, as it serves as a foretaste of different aspects that we will see, some of which have already begun to be seen.

The long reign of Elizabeth II represents the gestation of American hegemony over a third of the world, the affirmation of what we call "social democracy" on the basis of the New Deal, something the British came to work on as well. But it also meant the fall of such a model, the technical tie between the Soviets and the Western bloc which benefited East Asia, particularly China, the arrival of neo-liberalism with the resistance of social democracy, which dominated the "spirit of an era", for neo-liberalism is this new "spirit of an era", which is now being questioned and defended in desperation with the Truss speech, a speech that is difficult to put into practice, just as it has regressed on the question of the energy bill.

And I spoke of analogies... and there are plenty of them. I anticipated this on 25 January 2022 when I explained that the tensions between the neo-liberals (very attached to Russia... for the moment) were at their peak with the US "hyperinflation". In that paper I explained that the underlying issue is, given the geopolitical context, what is coming, and it has accelerated from various perspectives, and nothing else has happened but to deepen along these lines, i.e.: the need to set the industrial transformation in motion; do not suffer the doomsayers who have been predicting the traditional crisis of labour for centuries: we are now facing a complete industrial revolution and, moreover, a transition of hegemony, just as happened in the phase before the Second World War, so after tightening the screws on the poor, just as the futurist bosses of that time did, and I refer again to this document I wrote, now comes the same thing but on a scale never seen before and with a global and definitive resolution. ... and this is what it is all about for the neoliberals or financial speculators and debt leverers of the era I describe in this document which I insist you read, and also in their inter-war era and their resistance to the New Deal beyond the Second World War itself... who fear precisely a change of model leading to a change of ecosystem where their interests must change in order to progress, and thereby support another world order. The great industrial revolutions have led to work for all as soon as everything is in place, but before that, of course, someone is too clever and wants to have too much control over wages, unemployment, etc. Thus, for example, Amazon gave in with the unionisation of its workers, and Apple managed to contain the will of its workers with means reminiscent of those of the futurists with the control of the strategic productive elements of the interwar period when its workers, still weakened and lost, were vulnerable (that the left is dead and Marxism is dead is also a classic of that time and of this one... and of seeing it resurrected before its time and launching the extreme right, that too).

This is explained very well by Rana Foroohar on 5 September 2022. The world is getting in such a way that it demands to industrialise and to do it in a very strong way, which leads to inflation and with that to another kind of economic policies, and with that to another price of money. And now it is something that cannot be stopped and cannot be delayed: if it stops, China will raze us to the ground.

In my anticipation of 25 January 2022, I also spoke of Germany and the United States, as well as France and Italy in the 1970s. Read it, because we are now revisiting the same struggle and with certain elements of interest that should be borne in mind. Indeed, the Anglo-Saxons have been able to move very well in Germany's zone of geo-economic expansion (and in Germany's and France's zone of power projection), which is towards Russia. Do not look for conspiracies because you will find evidence. Europe cannot be built from the Franco-German axis and it cannot be built unless it is in accordance with a great geopolitical project... On 7 January 2022 I detailed in the third part of the anticipation document beyond the French Presidency in the first half of 2022 that we would see the resolution of the traditional game between the United States, Europe and Russia, and I explained how it makes no sense to imagine a Europe without both sides, Russia and the United States, being aware of the evidence of how the two powers are performing, and I pointed out the evidence of the American presence given the German design, just as we must point out the presence of China... and subsidiary to this, that of Russia. On 16 May 2022 I pointed out the evidence, for example, on the question of technology and how they are fighting for global dominance in this regard.

In this sense, the UK has used strategic planning that it has always had in the field of geopolitics, hence the correct reading of Brexit as an element of containment to the Russian-Chinese bloc (which is neither a liberation bloc nor an assertion of "European patriots"; I know about the clarification, but anyway...). So both Germany and the UK have had their links with Russia, but unlike Germany, the UK has been effective and quick to reposition itself on the chessboard and take a clear advantage, even if it is clear to them that Germany and France and their establishment will resist as long as they can, as will Russia, and certainly China but Chinese game is on a different level.

The accession of Charles III to the throne implies different consequences and a whole series of possibilities, with trials, errors, corrections and improvements in Anglo-Saxon leadership for rethinking liberalism and cosmopolitanism.

I am talking about "The Great Reset Initiative", an initiative of Klaus Schwab and Charles, as Prince of Wales. It is worth remembering that there is something called Commonwealth, something we have already talked about a few times at the Instituto Symposium through its Journal Hermes Kalamos.

Finally, I would like to encourage you to share this analysis, if you feel it is appropriate, and I would encourage you to subscribe to our mailing list, because as Instituto Symposium we are in the midst of a transformation in line with the times we live in.

To give you an element of reflexion on British pop culture, I am going to leave you with three sequences corresponding to two films from the first decade of the 21st century.

No film explains Thatcherism and its consequences in London as well as two of my proposals: Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004) and RocknRolla (Guy Ritchie, 2008).

The first one talks about East London before the London 2012 Olympics, and the capitalism that emerges for that working class, with an interesting assimilation to zombies, as you can see in these two sequences:

The real zombies of reality, the poor with their bad jobs, or with their unemployment situation. The poor spread and "infect", and in today's postmodern zombie fable there is no longer any hiding place for George A. Romero's first zombie, a mockery of the "ideological confusion" that a certain person might experience at a certain moment in their life for thinking that perhaps things could be otherwise... and let's not talk about reading.

In fact, George A. Romero understood Shaun of the Dead perfectly well, not least because of the homage it receives in the British film on several occasions. Thus, in 2005, George A. Romero interpreted the zombie issue in terms of the capitalism of the time with Land of the Dead. It is interesting that in this film there is a cameo by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg as zombies, and in fact, there is a short documentary entitled When Shaun Met George (Dan Mudford, 2005) about this collaboration.

Here is how these two state funerals speak to the time ahead of us.