Spaceman Spiff calls our attention to the latest attempt to un-person a writer who has managed to outrage progressives:
The popular pseudonymous Substack writer, Morgoth, has been doxxed. Outed by an organization dedicated to tackling extremism and online harm.
You can read about his ordeal here:
They produced an article to unmask Morgoth’s real-world identity against his wishes, including photographs. It is replete with incendiary accusations we have grown accustomed to seeing in these attempts to discredit writers who challenge the status quo.
The impression presented is one of a bigoted figure, someone dangerously unhinged. It bears little relation to reality as Morgoth’s readers will confirm. But that hardly matters.
Doxxing exercises exist so the laptop class can efficiently file people into a convenient extremist bucket. All the hard work has been done so the distracted can skim the article and take what they need. Fascism, white supremacy, hate, racism, bigotry; take your pick.
Doxxing is not about facts, it is about keywords. More accurately it is about “hate crimes”. Those who transgress these ever-changing taboos are unfit to live among us.
Even better the piece can be exploited by others. Fascist influencer Morgoth, online hatemonger Morgoth, disgraced racist Morgoth. The current obsession with speech controls can make good use of an incestuous network of activists posing as reporters. Since the material now exists journalists can reference it to further discredit should this be needed in future.
The shrill nature of these denouncements is the giveaway all is not well in the world of perception management. No plan survives contact with the enemy, and the desire to corral all dissidents into one big extremist bucket sounds fine on paper. But much of what Morgoth writes about is widely discussed by the public at large, even if ignored by the traditional media or the political world. If Morgoth is a racist hate-driven genocidal monster then so are most of the population, which of course they are not.
This kind of thing used to work well. But as Morgoth’s own articles allude to, their enemy is reality not Substackers.
The curiously suicidal ideas the educated classes cling to are largely based on magical thinking. We can change the weather by blowing up power stations and levying taxes; we can successfully assimilate millions of hostile foreigners who dislike us and our culture; women will be happier if they work longer hours and don’t have children.
The degree of propaganda needed to maintain today’s narratives is considerable. Less advertised is how brittle it has become. Challenges to these narratives, and the theoretical foundations upon which they rest, are therefore feared by their promoters, and rightly so.
From this perspective people writing online and criticizing today’s sacred cows are worth targeting and smearing. Hence the exposure, the denouncements, the dredging up of comments from a decade ago, out of context and out of time. They know their audience don’t really care. They just need the satisfying feeling they are on the right side of history.
We’ve all become characters in some dystopian sci-fi novel. I’ve become the faceless old guy sitting in a dark romm wondering what the hell has happened to my world.
Until some fanatic disapproves of a comment I dropped on a web site ten years ago…
JWM
Comment by jwm — May 31, 2025 @ 10:29
I used to read a lot of science fiction, and in all that I read a lot of post-apocalyptic/dystopian stuff. We’ve somehow managed to mis-manage ourselves into a post-cultural-apocalypse without even an earth-shattering war to trigger it. All the Very Clever Boys don’t even seem to realize just how bad things are getting.
Comment by Nicholas — May 31, 2025 @ 14:18