For those who received email alert for this post please read ‘Garnished’ as Garnered.
Norton’s New Year’s message confirmed that the PNC’s branding has been long gone, now.
“Gradually then Suddenly” was Hemingway’s confession to his bankruptcy. This wasn’t gradual because we’d heard multiple versions of his crock before.
Unwanted by 80% of the electorate, he interprets as a warm welcome. Defiant, he feels is a winning gambit.
It’s a political pathology that he’s lurking behind as an affliction. It provides cover for him to deploy dysfunction as a strategy and blame the destruction by his leadership on some systemic fault.
That he stood in 2025 to deliver an annual address on behalf of the Party that he decimated, just 120 days earlier, is what makes him uniquely detestable. And the speech- its presentation, lacking conventional mirth, marginally informative and largely unsubstantial – was another one of his jaw-grinding deliveries of Nothing.
Archives would gladly yield pivotal speeches shaping Party and National Identity that would have been delivered by the Founders of the PNC; most notably its Leader, Forbes Burnham.
It’s this striking contrast that affirms the misplacement of Norton at the helm of a movement that was not only founded on academic accomplishment and intellectual investment but on natural pride; demonstrated in bearing and carriage that trade -marked the leaders of the PNC.
Lots of talk about him, on looking back to his Young Socialist Movement – YSM – days, mostly to carbon date his presence in the Party; never to ascribe a meaningful contribution for the decades of his membership. Even more talk, now, about how he has remade the Party to secure and protect his leadership.
The plank of decency has been replaced by a regimen in servitude…subordinating, when not totally ignoring, Executive duties to stay on the ‘payroll’, is the sentiment.
Talk about a thug ring being in employ is an open secret. Folks are starting to see the Leader as more than the sum of his squalid parts, it is said.
This is why he is able to hold the Party hostage, they conclude, because people function more out of fear of personal harm than out of political conviction and policy alignment.
Policy alignment, you ask? We do too. We remember the 2025 Manifesto – ‘Compact with Guyana “putting People First” ‘! As opposed to??
It was a re- purposing of one of the hollow generic ‘pick a slogan’ mantras, barely anchored in civic purpose but with just enough mention of the term ‘People’, to make it a recitation. If anything, Norton knows that his followers don’t know- those members of the 17.79% club, the 78K committed souls to his rancid candidacy out of the 438,467K votes cast, nationally.
He has that unique ability to make them feel scholarly, make them feel that they’re charting his way, punctuated by the ‘we will rise again’ speech he gave to establish a ‘feel good’ fraternity with them.
Only thing is that, he is the one who delivered the loss, not them.
Norton is the one who ripped away a carefully constructed franchise of political craftsmanship, gifted to us by the irreplaceable genius of PNC Founders.
He is the one who preyed upon the vulnerabilities of those steeped in identity politics because it is simpleminded and allowed him to present himself as genius, because his political wattage registered right above dull, amongst these groupies.
He took his favorite path, the Low Road, where he is a skilled navigator because it is underhanded and unethical, a place where he could call ineptitude dislike.
Then, he used every stale-dated and obsolete, policy, rule, Constitutional loop hole, to swing to leadership, where Desmond Hoyte all but foretold his national rejection. His lack of social pedigree and overt discomfort, where social graces are a prerequisite, is always glaring.
He’s a scrapper….who delighted in asymmetric warfare against another Leader, then Corbin, and was ably assisted by the man from GECOM.
And all this underscores why Hostage Politics has become his refuge. He has garnished the attention- FINALLY– of the men he was always forced to look up to, those of scholarship, poise and decorum because he has shown them how weak decency is.
He has hijacked the Party through what they lacked – unscrupulousness, amorality- and now barricades himself in place by refusing to do what he once termed the decent thing for Hoyte to do – resign.
So, he is overtly ignoring their overtures to demit office ‘for the greater good of the Party’, with a triumphal smirk that places a premium on being dishonest and unprincipled.
We ask why are they still treating him as if he has responded with any measure of civility, fully aware that such questions may challenge objective journalism.
That may be true but his wily instinct confirms that he is petrified of failure, will never accept that he is a loser and was never endowed with the charisma– that natural personal charm and magnetic personality– the absence of which delivered the crushing destruction of the PNC, when he dared to defy his lack of voter appeal.
Others, still, do take offense to addressing him as Loser, Failure and Con Artist, with his manufactured portfolio of accomplishments, expressly, Political Scientist.
But these are the built in blind spots of propriety that overshadowed his back– end finagling to becoming the sole Presidential Candidate for a position for which he was overwhelmingly under-qualified. And it’s all this proforma courtesy that has emboldened his hostage politics…that of ignoring overtures issued in very refined prose for him to demit forthwith…it is said.
We’re not going to suggest that PNC Fund Raising has anything to do with Norton’s Hostage Politics. But we’ll mention it because there is a certain degree of apprehension expressed over his North America Fund Raising ventures.
We’re not surprised.
We always commented on him being hailed as Opposition Leader at functions organized, expressly for him to raise money as PNC Leader. Good Old Bookkeeping. Journals. Date Order. General Ledger. Nothing fancy but it definitely records Amount and Origin of Receipts – even Anonymous- and their disbursement.
And just as there remains questions about the proof of what was actually received- because what was logged is what was reported by the man whose moral fiber entrapped the Party into its own broken system that made him its leader-there remains questions about why a man, who would resort to sabotage for personal gain, would find self- gratification in the concept of resigning for the Greater Good.
Greater Good, a moral theory, invokes innate ethical principle, the most moral action, to determine maximum benefit for the greater number of potential beneficiaries and not just one. In other words, it’s a built-in dispenser of decency that is triggered when situations like resignation arise.
We know Norton’s decency- trigger works because he called on Desmond Hoyte who lost 5 seats…100% less than he did in 2025…to resign because he saw the loss of 5 seats as both egregious and deleterious.
So, we’re not going to dismiss his refusal to apply the same standard to his dismantling of the Party by sheer and resounding rejection of candidacy, which was forecast by— amongst other administrative warts— his monumental incompetence.
We shouldn’t have to kill his voters twice by reminding them that his first Party meeting ever, after his ascension to office in January 2022 – was January 16th 2025. And we’re surely never going to file the non activation of his decency-dispenser under Congenital Defect – that category that is more divine than demonic.
It is always better for the unwanted politician to resign. Resignation prioritizes integrity of the office and stability of the Party which casts parting glory on the resignee.
But resignations are political acts, not moral ones.
And a hostage that begins to feel the pressure of interminable abduction takes a carefully calculated risk to subdue his jailer.
There are lots of ways to reverse hostage fortunes.
Remember.
The longer the captivity the stronger the captor. Every day in subduement is a day in surrender. Everyday in surrender is loss of agency. Loss of agency is the goal of the hijacker.
With Norton commandeering the fort, a couple of things are noteworthy.
He will weaponize his incompetence as a means of holding frantic, committed, members at bay. He will make escalatingly more disfiguring decisions by pulling one more teetering thing loose. It is the power play of the weak and politically impotent. It is the behavior of the loser for whom failure is the worst possible penalty.
The organized cash grant protest, that was an absurd spectacle of unserious politicking, was a deliberate body blow to the crumbling PNC, which Norton delivered with the callous contempt of the opponent with the grenade.
The bottom line is that he is refusing to resign because, in squirreling his way into leadership, he discovered that the mechanism in place does not have an eject button. He won’t have to face his most abject fear- failure- if he navigates around those calling for his resignation by daring them to make their calls public, through steering the Party to more unflattering public exposure, like his often unsolicited public commentary.
Wonder what would happen if the PPP responded to this video of January 2026, asking him to present his plans on anything Venezuela which he would have had five years to craft and tweak, by his own submission.
Wonder if those fighting to salvage what’s left of the teetering ruins have watched this jaw grinder and wondered what would be delivered to meet such a challenge…especially if the questions are crafted to include the time frame Norton has suggested he has been brainstorming the possibilities of all things Venezuela.
Look.
Public drumming and calls from every enclave, with hopes for the recovery and restoration of the PNC, are now frantically overdue, 120 days post mortem its legendary existence.
Aubrey Norton, in servitude to an alter ego, is a scorched- earth contender, fierce only because he is afraid of failure.
Meanwhile, a multiplicity of simultaneous activity, we’re sure, is in the works for when the inevitable dislodging of this unwanted leader, who’s clinging on to leadership like a suicide bomber, occurs, much sooner than later.
Showing Grace, we understand may be the reflex of religious orientation that many of us have been guided by. But that same religion taught us what is Sin, like Vainglory…an excess of pride for self-gain, or lying and inveigling to steal a Political Party which robs others of its benefits.
And because of the paradox this presents, we were taught that we don’t get Grace as a right to sin but as a directive on why righteous behavior should be the choice, not Sin. Not to mention, we were born with the mind of Christ, which makes us all capable thinkers.
But this is not Sunday School. This is Politics – the dirtier version of Religion.
Aubrey Norton has demolished and disenfranchised an entire institution, the People’s National Congress.
There should be no silent calls, no diplomatic overtures to broadcast, not only that he is currently unwanted, but that his defiance will no longer be tolerated.
Calls for his immediate remit or removal should now be dominating all of the airwaves and media spaces, if the Peoples National Congress is to survive his use of this Legacy Entity, this political inheritance for those of PNC orientation, to catapult himself to heights for which he was always, manifestly, unsuited.