The title of this piece says it all—WTF 2020? How are we to make sense of the absolute insanity of the past year? This piece will seek to answer that question or at least offer some helpful frames to assist in the process.
The first frame to help gain some coherency in the midst of so much dissonance is that of astrology.
In 2020 Saturn and Pluto went into conjunction with each other. This alignment is a rare configuration and a very ominous one (typically) to boot. During the 20th century that precise alignment occurred a few times. The first coincided with the outbreak of WWI (1914). The Spanish Influenza outbreak also was in close proximity to this alignment (1917). The Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1947 gave us the rise of the postwar UFO phenomenon as well as the beginning of the Cold War. The 1982 version of Saturn & Pluto lead to a major economic downturn and the intense conservative era of Reagan, Thatcher, etc.
Saturn (aka Kronos) is the symbol of time, karmic debts, constraint, discipline, habit, custom, and institutional legacy. Pluto (Hades) is the ruler of the underworld and represents alchemical death and rebirth. So when Pluto and Saturn intersect Pluto brings the death of the existing institutional and governmental paradigm (Saturn), often leading historically to periods of mass social upheaval.
This particular 2020 Saturn-Pluto conjunction took place in the sign of Capricorn. Saturn is the ruler of Capricorn so Saturn was in a space of pre-eminent power—meaning the conjunction was even that much more potent. Capricorn (sea goat) is the sign of administration, earthly organization and structure. So we have Pluto, death and rebirth coming up against the institutional karmic legacy of human administrative and earthly governmental power and physicality (i.e. health).
In a most eerie manner, the astrological chart of the United States had this conjunction occur in the 4th house—the house of home and family. As Gordon White of Rune Soup, in conversation with astrologer Austin Coppock says, Saturn & Pluto in Capricorn shows up as the largest imprisonment in human history (in homes!).
Another major astrological element that’s key to understand is the entrance of Uranus into the sign of Taurus (the bull). As Richard Tarnas argued in his book Cosmos and Psyche, Uranus should have been named Prometheus. Prometheus stole fire from the gods and is the patron deity of transhumanism (covered on the site previously here and here). Taurus the bull represents money and finances, among other things—think “bull” markets, symbolized by the famous bull in front of Wall Street. Prometheus/Uranus is the great challenger and revolutionary energy. So that energy moving into the sign of finances, means that the entire financial system is up for revolutionary change. We’ve seen the rise of digital currencies pointing in precisely this direction.
When we combine this Uranus-Taurus energy with the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in administrative (Capricorn) dynamics, we see the stock market crash of early 2020 and the push to develop a new form of capitalism/economics known as The Great Reset.
The old governing (Capricorn) order (Saturn) is dying away (Pluto), particularly around finances (Taurus), leading to the need to come up with a new emergent, revolutionary paradigm (Uranus).
The end of 2020 saw the so-called Great Conjunction between Saturn and Jupiter, as both planets moved into direct alignment with each other, as well as entering into the sign of Aquarius—as in the “Age of Aquarius.”
Saturn also traditionally rules Aquarius so Saturn will continue to be in a powerful position for the next few years (until mid 2023 to be precise). Jupiter-Saturn great conjunctions open up a 200 year mega-cycle, essentially an epoch within astrology. The previous epoch was one of earth signs, whereas this era will be dominated by air signs.
As Gordon White says the new colonialism is digital, rather than control of actual land and material resources (earth sign circa 1800-2020). Air signs represent the realm of mind/ideas and are more quick moving than earth signs.
As part of that movement, note that Capricorn is an earth sign, Aquarius is an air sign. Aquarius symbolizes the energy of uniqueness, going one’s own way, overturning custom. There’s a paradox there with Aquarius being ruled by Saturn, the arch-conservative, But consider Saturnalia—a temple dedicated to Saturn (in late December) which involved partying and overturning social norms: sexual, financial, moral, etc.
Chris Knowles, of the Secret Sun blog, has looked at the recent storming of the US Capitol (aka “Capitoline Hill”) as a contemporary reenactment of Saturnalia, with a strange yet dark party atmosphere overturning all social-governmental norms. Right on cue with Saturn entering into Aquarius.
In other words, the customs and new rules arising from the ashes of 2020 (Pluto-Saturn in Capricorn) will be deeply digital, “ethereal” (airy), existing in the hyperspace of online worlds. The purge of de-platforming, silencing, and online censorship is very much a Saturnian reaping in Aquarian (e)terrain.
The more modern ruler of Aquarius is our old pal Uranus, which makes more sense of the joint revolutionary dynamics of both. So expect a great deal of social whiplash, bifurcation, and a kind of collective manic depression as Saturn and Uranus vie for control of the Aquarian dynamics. The push towards greater and greater degrees of electronic, digital, and satellite-based surveillance (Saturn) versus attempts to push back against the growing digital tyranny (Uranus), all using much of the same technology (Aquarius).
It’s also worth noting that Neptune is currently in long transit though the sign of Pisces. Neptune rules Pisces so Neptune is in a position of strength (one often overlooked). Neptune is the energy of dreams, the watery depths, the transcendental, but also therefore illusions and delusions. Pisces is the sign of spiritual realization, the dissolution of boundaries, and the like. Neptune in his house of Pisces correlates with the rise of “fake news”, ontological breakdown, mass confusion and bewilderment, and near-constant disinformation war. All that taking place at precisely the time that the new ruling paradigm (Saturn) will become digital/online (Aquarius), after having destroyed (Pluto) the previous existing system (Capricorn), while the entire financial edifice (Taurus) is being rocked by revolutionary energy for change (Uranus/Prometheus).
We could go further and align those larger outer-planet dynamics with specific inner planet dynamics, like for example various Mars intersections with those dynamics leading to periods of peak protest, rioting, and public conflagration (Mars = god of fire/war), but that should for now be sufficient for our purposes here.
The astrological framework helps give a sense of the larger forces at play in the cosmos but doesn’t specifically predict how humans will respond to those movements, including say a hidden elite (“cryptocracy” or “deep state”). We do know that elites have a long standing fascination with astrological lore and with the use of ritual (both public and occult) timed to various astrological sequences. Thinking in those terms allow us to start seeing how these larger cosmic patterns have been responded to, even exploited, in 2020 and moving into 2021.
In a previous piece entitled The Universal Basic Income Shell Game, I explored how I believed Universal Basic Income (UBI) schemes would be used as a Trojan horse for technocratic transhumanist control. I also believe green environmentalism will be used in precisely the same way—I covered that argument in this piece on Luciferianism and eco-terrorism in the characters of Sauron from Lord of the Rings and Thanos from Avengers: Infinity War.
Please note: The Lord of the Rings in astrological terms is our dear old friend Saturn. Also, Thanos grew up on the planet Titan, one of the moons of Saturn.
UBIs will be presented as a very progressive (Promethean/Uranian) offering to help solve the multiple systemic structural crises we have (Capricorn), especially in economics (Taurus). Under such progressive cover a very hardcore (Saturnian) regime could be implemented built out of satellites and digital infrastructure (Aquarius), which again will present itself as counter-cultural and perhaps even “new age” (Aquarius) but which will be an updated version of the old game of control (Saturn). This trajectory would line up with my earlier pieces arguing that transhumanism and new age ascensions spirituality (Neptune in Pisces + Jupiter in Aquarius) are more and more converging to support technocratic ends.
Back to Neptune in Pisces for a second. 2020 was the year conspiracy thinking went mainstream, as well as the major backlash against such thinking. Here at Limited Hangout we were ahead of the curve on that one with multiple pieces exploring a sane, grounded approach to conspiracy thinking around the site.
And boy was that backlash intense. The rise of think pieces decrying the rise of so-called “con-spirituality” from the self-appointed “very serious” intelligentsia suggests some very deep nerve has been touched by conspiracy thought.
Saturn is the karmic debt collector. Saturn plus Pluto brings things out of darkness (Pluto) into the light, particularly debts that have been kept off the books (Saturn). Saturn and Pluto’s motto would be: time to pay the piper.
And it is precisely over the last few years that we have seen multiple revelations of the deep rot of our world. Epstein, NXVIM, Hollywood sexual abuse issues, The Panama Papers, all revealing the hellish (Pluto) nature of power in our world. Genuine conspiracist/parapolitical thought (vs. Junk conspiracy) for a long time have been pointing to all the precise issues that been coming to the fore in the last few years, especially in 2020.
Rather than face that reality, the mainstream press has gone into attacking and tarring all parapolitical thought with the evil label of “conspiracy theory." In other words, it's just another version of an ongoing diversionary tactic and longstanding tradition of mind control tactics in the public sphere (as detailed in this piece). The brilliance of that psychological operation is that by getting elements of the mainstream liberal persuasion to argue against any conspiracy thinking on grounds of irrationality (the great sin against liberal modernity), liberals became a 5th column for the development of deeper systemic control because they refuse to sift through between genuine versus false parapolitical/conspiratorial thought (see Ezekiel73’s long trauma war series for more on that point.)
Liberal of course is a word whose root meaning is “freedom” (liberate, liberality) but contemporary liberals—as I’ve covered elsewhere on the site—have become the antithesis of those supporting freedom.
Liberals recently cheered when Donald Trump was banned from Twitter for life. As I discussed in this piece—Why the Handmaid’s Tale is Not the Dystopia You’re Looking For—based on an analogy with the French Revolution, I argued that liberals would be the “useful idiots” for the setup of digitized tyranny. The reason being is that eventually the very mechanisms they have created like shadow banning, cancel culture, and de-platforming will be turned around and used against them in a mass conservative backlash. Meanwhile as liberals spend all their time imagining Trump is the great harbinger of fascism come back from the dead, the actual contemporary fascism of technocratic corporatist rule will continue to embed its tentacles further and further into media, academia, governmental, cultural, and corporate domains.
In 2020, (most) Liberals called for the lockdowns, heavy fines and police response around the coronavirus outbreak. Then the Black Lives Matters protests erupted and those same liberals and progressives turned around and were pro-mass public demonstrations during a supposed pandemic. Conservatives (rightly) balked at the pure and totally transparent hypocrisy and double standard at play--either the lockdown was not necessary for slowing down the spread of the virus or conversely, it was, and therefore the protests should not have taken place. Right on cue then, many conservatives then called for militarized police responses to the protests.
To prove the point that liberals create the ideological cover for means of enslavement that will eventually be used on them, the same contact tracing apps that were used for Covid were then used to track down protestors. That didn't take long.
Both sides of the (false) left-right divide ultimately pushed for dominance and surveillance and a control grid. The dark sinister genius of the larger psychological operation is both liberals and conservatives ended up pushing for technocracy (a textbook case of controlled dialectics).
Furthermore with the right’s own public protests (Capitol Hill), various groups were mobilized and were infiltrated in order to exacerbate violence and chaos (“strategy of tension”), just as left-wing protests movements were earlier in 2020. See Catherine Austin Fitts’ research showing that the rioting that broke out during the Black Lives Matter protests often targeted areas slated as “opportunity zones”. Opportunity zones were created ostensibly to help build up poorer neighborhoods in a supposedly more liberal/progressive manner but, like UBIs, turned out to be a cover for wealth transfer to elites.
Opportunity zones, by the way, were passed very warmly by US President Donald Trump and the then Republican-controlled Congress, as part of Trump’s massive giveaway to the elites in his tax cut legislation (2017).
Then after the Democrats won the House of Representatives (2018) and supposedly were locked in mortal combat with each other, those two supposedly intractable sides had time to pass FASAB-56 legislation which put basically the entire US governmental budget in a black operation world. Even though the mainstream press (and much of the pro-Trump world) spent the last years proclaiming these sides were so radically opposed to each other they could never work together, they definitely managed to make that happen.
Long story short: create a false binary between one group as the self-appointed “rational” ones advocating (unconsciously) for the true insanity of technocracy and the other group becomes what they are labeled in a weird shadow way—they become irrational and chthonic. This bifurcation leads to mass dissonance, hysteria, confusion and overwhelm. Meanwhile the hidden hand/deeper forces can continue to play out their long standing game of technocratic control. As Harry Houdini said, magic is about all distraction and diversion.
Speaking of the deep state/hidden hand we saw an incredible amount of action on that front. At least that’s how we’re being told to understand the insanity of 2020, especially (but definitely not limited to) the US Presidential election. But is that what we really saw? Is that what really happened?
I’m going to throw out a counter-intuitive and potentially very unpopular idea in response to that notion:
What if a lot of the chaos and public dissonance of 2020 was largely spectacle? What if it was “full of sound and fury” not exactly signifying nothing but meaning actually much less than many imagine?
What I mean is that when we look through these larger lenses—like the astrological—as well as specific stories of major importance that largely went under the radar—like opportunity zones + FASB-56—then how much of the right/left battling over this year was actually really relevant when viewed from the standpoint of the parapolitical?
It’s certainly true that 2020 saw open warfare between various factions of the cryptocracy/deep state. In fact the entire period from 2017-2020 was really one long running series of skirmishes and battles in that ongoing war: starting with Russiagate, through the Mueller Report, the Impeachment Saga, and now the recent Capitol Hill storming and fallout and Impeachment Part Deux.
But a look deeper than those surface fights, reveals the continued march of the movement towards greater technocratic control and rule.
As I covered in two previous pieces on the penetration of fascism into the US (and UK and other NATO countries) after the end of the Second World War, fascism is central to the contemporary political reality. It is the occulted hidden force deeply influential in the development of the later half of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st.
Fascism has deep roots into both the US Republican Party apparatus, as well as (surprisingly) the Democratic establishment. It’s a certain strain of fascism, a kind of inverted totalitarianism (as Sheldon Wolin called it).
Here’s a tweet from Global Guerrillas theorist John Robb that encapsulates what I’m referring to…this tweet was in response to Trump’s lifetime ban from Twitter (Jan 8):
Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, etc. all acting in concert. Companies that collectively control the information flow for 3 billion people. Companies, without which, modern is impossible. These companies have just announced they are in control of the US political system.
(Yes I realize it’s hyper-surreal that he wrote that on Twitter but there it is).
In a followup tweet Robb wrote:
I don’t get upset by battles between the left and the right. Those fights are transient. They don’t last. The things I worry about: systemic authoritarianism by the government or corporations. Like Patriot Act 2.0 and corporate control of speech/behavior. That stuff lasts.
And lastly one more:
‘Fascism is when you can’t slip a cigarette paper between the interests of the government and corporate business interest.’ —Mussolini
[Robb]: In this century, as opposed to the last, the corporations have the upper hand, not the government.”
There’s the inverted in inverted totalitarianism—inverted fascism, with the corporations on top of the political systems. This is the real game: the creation of a machinery of domination and wealth extraction and fundamental control. The left-right battles between various elite shadow factions is simply over who gets to profit from that machinery. Those sides may disagree on certain points of strategy and “branding” but there is fundamental agreement between them on the nature of that dominating, desecrating machinery.
Consider it like an organized crime cartel. The various “crime families” will fight and kill each other over turf and control of various sources of wealth and power—the gambling, the drugs, sexual slavery, etc.—but they never argue over the basic nature of the cartel, the criminal enterprise as such (and their monopolization of it). Same applies here. These are sides fighting to control the spoils of a psychological and economic war they perpetrate on their own populations, not to undo the nature of that domination system itself.
That’s the deeper game: technocracy.
That game is being played upon people and played out through human interactions and it’s that game that we have to keep our eyes on. It’s the game that makes coherent sense of these otherwise seemingly contradictory and unrelated phenomenon of Coronavirus lockdowns, The Great Reset, conspiracy and counter-conspiratorial labeling, Black Lives Matter protests, Trumpism, anti-Trumpism, and right-wing populist protests.
Take the Black Lives Matter protests. The protests arise due to an absolutely legitimate issue—police militarization and the drug war—but that movement got infiltrated and diverted to other ends. Agents provocateurs enter into (again legitimate) protests and then turn them violent, targeting areas set up to become opportunity zones, pushing out small business owners (especially African American ones). Over time we’ll see those areas bought up by elite financial money in order to turn them into some capitalist fever dream from which they will profit immensely through exploitation. To the degree that it was hijacked, The Black Lives Matter movement became unwittingly, in numerous instances, a pawn in a game of disaster capitalism, which just so happens to be deeply tied to MK-Ultra.
In a parallel manner, the right-wing pro-Trump march on the US Capitol was built out of groups of people legitimately attached to the worldview of Trumpism. They are squeezed economically. They see the insane overreach of the PC-enforced orthodoxy and the suppression of free speech by self-proclaimed “liberals and progressives”. Similarly, provocative elements sought to weaponize such a protest and turn it violent. Some of those provocateurs could be genuine hardcore right-wing revolutionary types and others might very have been agents of infiltration, in order that the whole movement can be tarred and feathered after the destruction and violence there.
Meanwhile the US populace is being very quickly conditioned to getting used to highly militarized presence around the US Congress and White House, further separating the elite plutocrats from the view of the “plebs”. Just as elites have been creating gated communities, outside of wider public view, the US federal government is going to become more and more “gated." Shades of Children of Men.
Without the ability to see this deeper game that play both sides against each other in order to keep attention focused there, rather than on the actual common enemy, then one is inevitably caught choosing one side of the other in the controlled dialectic. While it might be hard for 2021 to “trump” (excuse the bad pun) the amount of craziness on display, the deeper game of technocracy will continue to accelerate. That view is the one we must keep continually in mind, otherwise any hope of coherency is lost.
Lastly, 2020 was the year UFOs went mainstream. This process started back in 2017 but reached an intense pitch this year. As with the other topics, Limited Hangout was way ahead of the curve on this one, covering the UFO topic in a multitude of pieces. Given the foregoing analysis, how do UFOs fit into this larger picture of infiltrated protests cum riots, controlled dialectics, and lockdowns? As I argued in two recent pieces, I believe the mainstreaming of the UFO topic is part and parcel of this very same technocratic psycholgical operation.
In those pieces I argued that the public admission of UFOs is part of softening the masses to the introduction of super advanced technology and engineering, perhaps of an anti-gravitic, "free energy", and most definitely of a spaced-based colonizing reality. Those pieces cover the long history of psychological warfare deployed in and via the UFO Phenomenon. In particular I focused on how from the beginning the psychological operations in Ufology were to convince people that such possibilities must be "alien" to the human experience and as in some fashion "spiritual" or of an otherworldly nature (aliens as demons, angels, etc.). Consequently any such group of elite (humans) that were to control such technological possibilities would themselves be considered "other" than humanity. If such humans were to introduce publicly such technology they would be able to claim a "god-like" status, i.e. transhumanism. This "higher ontological status" could be used to legitimize a claim to a "natural" rule of the human populace.
This thread of Ufology too has it's own deeply fascistic roots as many of the members of the early contactee movement with their emphasis on "Blond Nordic" alien races were (quelle surprise!) fascists or at least fasctically-inclined. The contactee movement of the 1950s promoted the meme that these "higher" beings will come from above and bring with them a world government ending human rule and thereby finally bringing true peace and stability (something humans apparently can't do on their own). Conversely, the alien abduction and sinister invasion lore of the 1960-1980s, promulgated the notion of these beings as cold, amoral, sociopathic "reptilians", hell bent on enslaving humanity. Put those two together and you get a "higher race" of beings imposing a top-down tyranny, which cannot be crossed or resisted due to the terrifying nature of these elites, which will be officially "liberal" and evolved but in reality technocratic. In other words, the same psyop as the UBIs, opportunity zones, and the rest.
I'm not arguing that the UFO Phenomenon is entirely or only a deep state form of social engineering. As I've argued in numerous pieces, I believe there is an ontological reality to this high strange phenomenon, one that goes back at least thousands of years. Rather I see the psyop as a form of "piggybacking" on top of an existing phenomenon in order to exploit and control the narrative surrounding it to support technocratic means.
I began this piece looking at major astrological patterns for 2020. We started with star lore in other words. We're ending with UFOs, which brings us back to star lore once more. The push to bring the earth into planetary lockdown is a necessary step in the colonization of space. The satellites in space point "down" (to Earth) towards mass digitized surveillance while simultaneously pointing "up and out" into space. Technocracy seeks to do to the earth what it wants to do the cosmos (and vice versa).