Meghan Markle is a natural born US citizen and over 35 years old. Her mother’s official biography is that of a typical black woman from Ohio, her father’s that of a typical white man from Pennsylvania.

As a junior in college she interned at the State Department [1] then studied abroad, but she failed the Foreign Service Officer test and instead went into acting, as she had a double major in international studies and theater. In 2016 she started having sex with Prince Harry of the United Kingdom, later marrying him.

Her background is as American as Matthew McConaughey’s. They both have foreign spouses, the husbands are white and the wives are “of color.”

Markle is networking with Democrats to run for office. So it is quite possible that 2028 could see a Presidential campaign between Meghan Markle and Matthew McConaughey.

The neo-reactionaries and right-wingers will claim this as an inevitable result of “democracy,” and especially of universal suffrage, but that is a simplification.

If there was no electronic mass media, and instead the only way the voters were informed of the candidates for President and their respective proposals were by the written word or an in-person stump speech delivered without a loudspeaker, things would be quite different.

If the franchise were restricted to native-born white men, yet the Mass Media system was still in place, you would just get Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.

In the world without mass media, mass political parties are more important. It is via the human-centric network, the organization, that information about the candidates and their factions are broadcast – and narrowcasted.

In a centralized Mass Media system, a “populist” like Donald Trump can appear. He’s extremely popular among consumers of political news even though he is hated by people who are personally engaged in partisan politics.

So the glittering generalities of democratic culture, “the people,” “the masses,” “regular joes” and “the middle class,” are used to describe the audience of mass media broadcasts.

It is necessary to critique not the category of “whiteness” but the actual behavior of people racialized as “white” – and also assigned male at birth. It is particularly this group that constitute the neo-reaction and dissident right political space but also the largest faction of American voters.

In America the traditional Conspiracy Theory understanding of white supremacy is the KKK theory. In this analysis, the white men of America are networked in an elaborate racial conspiracy where the is an unspoken – and in private, spoken – arrangement to always favor whites over non-whites in daily life. [2]

Similarly, women clustered toward the high left side of cognition may interpret any myriad of male behaviors as conspiratorial. [3]

But as we can see, there is more or less no organized white male anything in contemporary America. The public civic institutions are rumps and completely integrated racially and sexually. There are very expensive zip codes all around America and whatever they lack in certain kinds of “diversity” e.g. African-American, they make up for in other kinds of “diversity” e.g. Asian-American. Whatever they are they are certainly not the Ku Klux Klan.

If the Inner Party are Washington DC bureaucrats and their friends in academia, what the Inner Party fears is not the Ku Klux Klan, a shadowy and conspiratorial faction organized clandestinely, but instead a mass electronic media company not under their control with a loyal audience of white males.

The number of people categorized as “Never Trump Republicans” – who were a major media presence in the last five years – is about equal to the number categorized as “InfoWars Republicans” who “believe in QAnon” – both groups are about 15-20% of the Republican party voters.

The 20th century American mass electronic media, starting with radio and cinema and maturing into television and now fragmenting on the Internet, was dominated by ABC, CBS, NBC, more or less indistinguishable brands, literally “Brand X” and “Brand Y.” Newspapers continued but the masses – thus, in a democratic system via elections, the mass vote – was more influenced by the new technologies.

So an American “consensus” was formed. The Internet started to break it down. A much, much wider set of opinions are now in the mix, an inevitable consequence of “diversity,” in fact.

No one would write a history of 20th century warfare without technology being a major component; in American political history we get some platitudes about Kennedy being more telegenic than Nixon.

9/11 was the big event at the dawn of the Internet as a mainstream platform and while “9/11 truth” was more or less able to be marginalized, the Iraq war narrative fell apart quite quickly. 20 years later no one brings up 9/11 when discussing the US war in Afghanistan, the cause belli itself is considered somewhat gauche to mention. Few Republican voters could describe the US military engagement in Syria and fewer could remember what was the cause of US intervention if they even knew it in the first place.

Neo-reactionary and dissident right critiques of democracy start to fall flat when considering Imperial policies that are simply not part of the democratic system. Not only did no one vote for the war in Syria, most voters are only vaguely aware of it, if at all. Clearly the democratic process simply has no bearing on the actions of the Empire.

If Donald Trump trying to build a wall and bring jobs back for regular white American men is a legitimate political narrative, than so is Meghan Markle being racistly rebuffed by the British Royal Family. An insult of the Royal Court, of a foreign Princess – a people’s princess, low born – this is a romance novel, literally, a Hallmark channel Christmas Princess movie. Just like Donald Trump’s fight with the government bureaucrats and the crooked FBI agents and the liberal media is a heroic narrative, and QAnon vs. the Deep State hard-boiled detective fiction.

The Royals used to have political power, then they become symbolic, then they became mass electronic media celebrities and now they are becoming villains before being phased out. The Pope, post World War II, went through a similar process. They had lost political power centuries before but they were made completely obsolete by electronic mass media.

So the Presidency of the United States may begin a similar devolution. Already Congress is demanding nuclear weapons be removed from the President’s exclusive control. As actors and celebrities move into position as Presidents and legislators, the elections become more and more symbolic, and further removed from the daily workings of Empire.

The Presidential campaigns are already essentially media pageants, “Reality TV” and the political rhetoric that gets streamed via the Internet has less and less to do with “substantive” issues and more and more about manners, social class, religious pieties, and symbolism.

While the Dissident Right will surely characterize these developments as “feminine” and “leftist” it is important to remember that, in context, it was the whites, not the blacks, the conservatives, not the liberals, and the Republicans, not the Democrats, who started this trend via Ronald Reagan. The Democrats eventually responded with Barack “Hope and Change” Obama, not a man but a marketing campaign. Not to be outdone by the liberals, the Republicans won it back with Donald Trump. Reagan was a traditional film actor while Donald Trump was the new “reality TV” style actor.

It is clearly white men driving this trend, and women and people of color following their lead.

The Inner Party – not really the Inner Party, but let’s humor the right-wingers – the Inner Party really flipped out over Cambridge Analytica and Internet free speech, and now QAnon and the Capitol Siege, because a huge faction of the white population of America would defect to a new Reality TV show, given the opportunity.

Obama hired Cass Sunstein to “cognitively infiltrate” the 9/11 truth movement, and he suggested a whole range of options, some effective yet obvious, some more obscure. Between the Boston Bombings and Sandy Hook, there was a real fight over who controlled the “official reality” online. What the latest polls are calling “Infowars Republicans” who “believe in some QAnon conspiracy theories” are an important part of the GOP coalition, the Alex Jones audience who subscribes to Roger Stone’s narratives.

Some faction like a Newscorp could come online, use Cambridge Analytica social media data and hire content creators to easily organize white men into a potent political, economic, and social force. What the Inner Party is really scared of is such a faction having to lie less than they do.

If there really were “White Supremacists” – if the sort of average “blue collar” guy, or the average “white small businessman” were really a racist, were really far-right extremists, it would be quite easy. They would organize clandestinely while allowing the official, “visible” government to continue to devolve into symbolism, as the British monarchy did, as the Papacy did, as the prestige of military officers has done.

The Klan was called “the Invisible Empire” and real Americans, Heritage Americans, have a long and rich tradition of secret governments.

But the Inner Party isn’t worried about that at all. What they are worried about is an outsider controlling an electronic media platform.

What did they do back in the 2000’s? The banned various Arab channels from America cable companies because they did not want Americans getting a narrative about the wars they did not control.

What did they do in 2015? They categorized a number of online properties “Russian Propaganda” and attempted to limit their reach, including Russia Today, Zero Hedge, and dozens of others.

They also banned Alex Jones from the mainstream Social Media companies. Why? Sandy Hook. The most successful dissident social media creators simply got removed from distribution, just as they had done to the Arabs and the Russians previously.

They are banning competitor platforms from mobile phones, at the app store and operating system level. Amazon banned Parler, an alternative system bankrolled by a mainstream Republican oligarch.

That is what they are afraid of, a development in communication infrastructure.

Democratic politics in the age of Social Media is driven by social status, and social status is granted by Social Media. So Appearance Reform is baked into the cards.

So if some rich and powerful faction came along and created such a network it would be quite easy to get white men to play along.

An interesting racial twist is that Mr. Matthew McConaughey and Mr. Meghan Markle both married and had children with “women of color” despite being extremely white men. In the American context, the concept of “anti-blackness” has always boiled down to a white person refusing to have sex with a black person. White men are notorious for taking Asian women but not Black women, and White women are, sexually, the most racially exclusive group. Both Mr. Matthew McConaughey and Mr. Meghan Markle have thus transcended race by choosing a woman over color over a white woman.

[1] Cough.
[2] E.g. the Eddie Murphy SNL parody ‘White Like Me’
[3] Feminist have suggested that men have historically conspired to “keep women out of the trades to keep them dependent on men.” The implication being that women would fix the toilets themselves if only her husband had taught her plumbing. This is something of a “Dad joke” but it is considered “serious feminist theory” so make of that what you will.