Civil Liberties

The World Turned Upside Down – What Is The Endgame?

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Seriously, I’m still trying to make sense of it all that an anodyne and apparently harmlessly patriotic organization like the Oathkeepers can suddenly become the Awful Violent and Whiteness-Counterrevolutionary Group From Hell, at least in the eyes of the National Establishment Media and their minions in social media. In my Tea Party days, we met with a couple of members of the Oathkeeper leadership cadre; they were speakers at a couple of events, IIRC. A fair number of the local Tea Party organizers whom I worked with were retired military. And frankly, the Oathkeepers looked to be … well, just ordinary and earnest common or garden-variety patriots with a background in the military and law enforcement.

This is only to be expected in a town like San Antonio, familiarly known as the Mother In Law to the Air Force (as enlisted basic training is located there as are a number of specialty tech schools, officer training used to be, and flight training for various aircraft is still carried out). San Antonio is also the Home of Army Medicine, as training for Army medical personnel has been performed at Fort Sam and Brooke Army Medical the end result being that one cannot heave a brick in any direction in San Antonio without hitting at least a dozen military retirees of every rank and service. The schtick of the Oathkeepers was basically renewing the enlistment oath.

 “I, __________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.”

It seems now that the words “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” are those that give the heebie jeebies to the powers that be in the rickety and ramshackle structure that is the Biden Administration, and those sad and addled creatures who have the unenviable task of doing their media bidding. Kind of sad, really as a sidebar to my main thesis, that the Mainstream Establishment Media is willingly, nay yet enthusiastically volunteering to do the same job that propagandists for Stalin’s Red Empire did at the threat of a sentence to the Gulag or to a shot in the back of the skull in the basement of a CHEKA HQ somewhere. But willing toadies to power are always a dime a dozen.

Seeing conservative activists being arrested for merely being in Washington on the day of the massive protest (commonly called a riot or insurrection by prog-leaning media and law enforcement) and held indefinitely without bail, while frequent-flyer Antifa/BLM rioters are on the catch-and-released-on-bail/charges dropped program, in spite of the year-long Antifa/BLM riots actually having done reckless damage to various cities. I presume that this difference is because the Antifa/BLM riots actually did substantial damage to ordinary flyover-country American property owners, whereas the Washington protest in January only scared the crap out of the Ruling Class.

Different strokes for different folks, according to the convenience of the Ruling class. Now there is a political measure afoot to pressure businesses into pledging loyalty to the regime by publicly affirming that the 2020 Election was completely fair and above-board. Or else. What is the eventual endgame in all of this? Pushing ordinary and patriotic citizens into a violent reaction, and thereby justifying further repression of non-prog thought? Discuss as you wish. I’ll get to the politization of the military in another post.

Green Shoots

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It’s springtime, and there are some signs of hope.

People who reached their breaking point on ‘wokeness’.

See also: How to defend free speech.

A Machine for Preventing Civil War

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Scott Alexander, in a 2017 post at Slate Star Codex:

People talk about Liberalism as if  it’s just another word for capitalism, or libertarianism, or vague center-left-Democratic Clintonism. Liberalism is none of these things. Liberalism is a technology for preventing civil war. It was forged in the fires of Hell : the horrors of the endless seventeenth century religious wars. For a hundred years, Europe tore itself apart in some of the most brutal ways imaginable, until finally, from the burning wreckage, we drew forth this amazing piece of  alien machinery. A machine that, when tuned just right, let people live together peacefully without doing the  “kill people for being Protestant” thing. Popular historical strategies for dealing with differences have included: brutally enforced conformity, brutally efficient genocide, and making sure to keep the alien machine tuned really really carefully.

Very insightful and correct, I believe, if by liberalism one means free speech, freedom of religion, and limited government, rather than the cluster of ‘progressive’ believe that often fly under the ‘liberalism’ brand today.

And when the above attributes of a society do not exist or are eroded, then live-and-let live  become difficult to impossible, and all questions become politicized, because political outcomes determine everything.

When the government controls everything, there is no constructive relief valve for all this pent-up tension.  It all boils down to a ‘historic’ election once every couple of years, upon whose outcome everything depends.  They’re all going to be  ‘historic’ elections from now on. That’s not a good thing.

Ultimately, the game of politics becomes like those Aztec ball games in which the losers are said to have been sacrificed.   Indeed, some of this is happening in America already today, with Democrats demanding that Trump and his supporters be pursued post-election in almost every possible way.

If the machine of liberalism (as defined above) is destroyed, then another kind of machine will quickly take its place…the machine described by Jean Anouilh in his version of Antigone:

The spring is wound up tight. It will uncoil of itself. That is what is so convenient in tragedy. The least little turn of the wrist will do the job . . . The rest is automatic. You don’t need to lift a finger. The machine is in perfect order; it has been oiled ever since time began, and it runs without friction

 

 

 

 

An astonishing article in Time on the 2020 election;

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Time magazine, nearly invisible for years, published an amazing story about how the 2020 election was stolen.

We figured some of this would eventually get out but to see it this soon is just astonishing. The author frames the story as one of “saving the election” from Donald Trump but, of course, that is not what it reveals.

A second odd thing happened amid Trump’s attempts to reverse the result: corporate America turned on him. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump’s candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede. To the President, something felt amiss. “It was all very, very strange,” Trump said on Dec. 2. “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.”

In a way, Trump was right.

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargaininspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protestsin which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

It is possible to see this from the author’s point of view. That seems to be that it was critical to not have riots and looting like those which occurred over most of the summer. In order to keep the peace, it was necessary to see that Trump did not win. The validity of the election was secondary, if that.

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.

That is a fairly good example of “newspeak. “Voter Suppression lawsuits” can be translated to voter ID requirements of any type. The “vote by mail” included the absence of voting day requirements or even signature checking. It was wide open for fraud.

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Narrowing Horizons

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William Shirer, on his experiences in Germany during the early Nazi era:

I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Germans I had daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and though I listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for the truth, said they were.

Even though Shirer had plenty of access to outside news and information sources, and was well aware of Nazi lies, he still found it difficult to escape psychologically from the effects of the stiflingly-constrained information environment.

Many of us have wondered how intelligent people–some of whom we may know personally–can fall so completely under the spell of the Democrat worldview, as it exists in its present ‘woke’ state…a worldview which is replete with ‘the most outlandish assertions,’ to use Shirer’s phrase.  But consider: if one gets one’s news from CNN, MSNBC, and even the traditional networks, and from newspapers such as The Washington Post and The New York Times and their imitators…and one’s entertainment from mainstream movies and musical groups…and one works for a company, university, or ‘nonprofit’…then one is living within a highly uniform information and opinion environment. Yes, you might be exposed to the occasional dissident opinion on social media or directly from friends and acquaintances, but you will develop ‘antibodies’, inculcated by the approved sources, which lead you to dismiss such opinions as conspiracy theories, brainwashing by Trump, or something similar.

It is, of course, much easier to find dissenting voices in 2021 America than it was in the time and place of which Shirer wrote.  (Shirer does say that ‘in those days, in the Thirties, a German listener could still tune his dial to a score of foreign radio stations’ without taking much risk…but most didn’t, evidently, or chose to disbelieve what they heard from outside sources.)

The psychological drive to conform reinforces the controlled information environment and discourages explorations outside of it.  In my post Oxytocin and Conformity, I cited some research on how the ‘cuddling and belonging’ hormone oxytocin affects public and private conformity, and recalled  one of the episodes of the TV series The World at War in which a German man spoke about the temptation to conform.  He had been strongly anti-Nazi, but admitted that he had felt a strong emotional pull to join the rallies and be a part of the the movement.  (He said it much more eloquently than the foregoing sentence would suggest)  I also cited a blog post whose author, after critiquing the craziness of the extreme “progressives,”  went on to say:

I’m going to be  very  real with you for a moment, and take off my hat has a blogger, an author, and whatever else I may be, and just speak to you as a man.

This could have been me.

Does that surprise you? There was a time I skirted so close to falling under this spell, it would shock you.  I felt the guilt, the social pressure, the desire for conformity. Despite the terrible weight such ideology carries on the mind, it is absurdly easy to fall into it. Every day we are assaulted by the agitprop. It is so easy to just say “yes, it’s all my fault, I will submit and obey.”

It will bring momentary relief, because you will no longer have to fight a narrative that is bombarded upon you 24 hours a day. That mental effort is, itself, rather exhausting on the mind. But if you accept the chains, that is a far greater weight, one that will destroy you. The chains are seductive. They call, because of the enormous weight of social power behind them.

The pressure is both great and subtle. Imagine a conversation about the weather, innocent enough on its own. A friend might say “wow, that global warming sure is kicking in today!” You’ve a few choices here. You can challenge him, but the immediate counter is likely to be something like “well, 99% of scientists agree, sooooo….” The implication, of course, is that you are stupid for disagreeing with 99% of scientists (whether or not there is any truth to  that  claim, either).  You could remain silent because it’s easier. Or you could just give in, regardless of the truth of the matter, because it’s  easiest.  Meanwhile, if you counter your friend successfully, you may be down a friend by the end of the night.

So whether or not a lot of folks believe this thing, soon consensus is reached, as much to peer pressure as anything else. Then it is, further, easier to agree on welfare, tax policy, affirmative action, black lives matter, social justice, etc… Each one has a superficial rhetorical argument which  sounds  nice, and which has enormous media programming and social pressure behind it.

A thousand such chats happen every day, both in the real world, and the social media world. The sum total of which is designed to move you, via peer pressure and Weaponized Empathy, toward self-hatred, and intense personal guilt for things which you neither did, nor were capable of preventing.

Soon a man might find himself agreeing with lunatic propositions that all Republicans are literal Nazis, and Donald Trump is worse than Hitler because… well, nobody really knows the reasons.

Submission is always the easier short-term choice. Long-term, however, it just destroys a man’s soul.

I am not asserting that the present-day Democrat belief system is identical to Naziism (although there are indeed some disturbing similarities as well as differences), or that the control of the information environment is as tight as what existed in mid-1930s Germany…but still, when you step back and look at all the ways in which a consistent worldview is being promulgated and views from outside that worldview are being suppressed, then the information horizons–especially for those people who don’t have a particularly strong need to think for themselves or willingness to challenge accepted beliefs–are narrowing at a pretty frightening rate.