Real Time History
Published Jun 21, 2024In late April 1975, dramatic images from Saigon are beamed across the world. North Vietnamese troops proclaimed final victory. Just how did the US lose the Vietnam War?
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October 24, 2024
Did the Media Lose the Vietnam War?
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October 23, 2024
Canadian history through the propagandist lens
Fortissax casually tosses a few bricks into the glass house of Canadian history as it has been taught to schoolchildren over the last 30-40 years:
During our annual Not One Body Found season, I thought I’d discuss the truth about the brutal violence and savagery of North America’s most early, prominent and influential indigenous tribes, and popular narratives surrounding them.
If you’re an ethnic Canadian, born in the 1990s, you’re no doubt familiar with the education system’s attempts to subject you to a program of Maoist-style struggle sessions over the alleged genocide of the indigenous peoples in Canada. These struggle sessions in classrooms and collective humiliation rituals serve multiple purposes. One is to de-legitimize the history of, and perpetuate the ongoing deconstruction of Canada. The other is to de-legitimize the existence of the Canadian people as a nation (defined as a group sharing ethnic, cultural, and historical ties), in preparation for demographic replacement via mass migration.
The average Canadian’s school experience is filled with a turbo-charged version of liberal Noble Savage mythology, which is still propagated by leftists and indigenous activists. This has given the impression to many of the indigenous tribes as a singular race, continent-wide, uniformly peace-loving, non-binary, nature-appreciating matriarchal egalitarians until the evil, white, patriarchal Christian man arrived.
This resembles equally revisionist history about the Indo-European invasions into Europe around 4000 B.C. against the Pre-Indo-Europeans. You know that story: patriarchal brutes from the Eurasian steppes, with their advanced bronze weaponry and horse-powered chariots, wiped out the longhouse-dwelling, peace-loving, egalitarian agricultural Early European Farmers, who were feminist. This theory, conceived by Maria Gimbutas, a feminist intellectual, was debunked and discarded years ago. In reality, the Early-European-Farmers were extraordinarily warlike, violent, engaged in child murder or sacrifice and were apparently innovative as they built monuments like Stonehenge. This is much the same for indigenous in North America. All of this is framed in a Marxist oppressor-oppressed paradigm.
Tales of cruel treatment, deliberate biological warfare via smallpox blankets (of which there is only one known reference, with attempts to implement unknown), or extermination by colonial death squads haunts the minds of Canadians, planting the seeds of self-doubt and masochism. If you listen carefully to the rhetoric of leftists and indigenous activists, you’d be led to believe there was an industrial mass-slaughter of tribes, with conveyor belts funneling indigenous people into machines that spit out moccasins and dream catchers. The depopulation of indigenous tribes was not the result of deliberate action but rather Europeans being far more numerous and carrying diseases to which they had no immunity. The second cause was perpetual, brutal warfare by the survivors against each other. The mass depopulation from epidemic disease in North America occurred in the mid-1600s, after epidemic breakouts in the filthy, cramped conditions of Europe. Not almost a hundred years later in 1763, where smallpox blankets are merely discussed by General Jeffrey Amherst and Colonel Henry Bouquet.
Indigenous activists believe they were subject to a holocaust-style genocide. It is not a coincidence that the amplifying of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation occurs at the same time as the Managerial Regime in Canada has declared itself a “post-national state” (which the indigenous also live in and suffer consequences from). They believe Canada is a country without a people. Ironically this lines up with activists’ own definition of “cultural genocide”, because in 1867 during Confederation Year, according to census data, Canada was 92% Anglo-French, 7% miscellaneous Europeans, and the remaining 1% indigenous. Canada is unquestionably, unmistakably, a European construct of Anglo-French extraction.
In 2021, seemingly out of nowhere, the public was subjected to the establishment of this astroturfed federal holiday, which was made statutory—still only for employees of the federal government (what a coincidence!)—as of March 2023. Participation in this public humiliation ritual involves the coerced wearing of orange, and sometimes red, shirts. Canadians across the political spectrum knowingly or unknowingly participate in this ritual, with many rough, cowboy-hat-wearing, lifted-big-black-truck-driving conservatives, as well as tattooed, soy-eating, vegan ketamine enthusiast quartz-worshiping leftists also enthusiastically partaking.
It’s called being a decent human being, Chud! Schools, the monopolized legacy media, corporations, and brands all recognize and partake in the humiliation ritual, directed exclusively at ethnic Canadians. Football games have their players sing the national anthem, and every clinically obese, corn-syrup-slurping sportsball fan claps as the announcer humiliates and shames him or her with a land acknowledgement to prove to the crowd and community that they “don’t see race”. Medical professionals and university faculty across the country also include land acknowledgements in professional email signatures. Even law enforcement gleefully participate in the the ritual, dancing like circus monkeys to the tune of people who despise them.
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October 7, 2024
A grim anniversary
In the National Post, Barbara Kay notes the anniversary of the Hamas attacks along the Gaza-Israeli border that killed many Israeli civilians and led to the still-ongoing captivity for hundreds more:
One year on, Jews in the West have had time to process the primary shock of Hamas’s pogrom in southern Israel and the secondary shock of hateful blowback against Israel and Jews worldwide. We learned in a span of hours that where lethal antisemitism is concerned, “never again” was for us a mere objective, not a guarantee against those consumed by a mission of “again and again and again”.
But should we have been so surprised? Gaza was riddled with tunnels, their sole purpose to prepare for a war of extermination against Jews. The West’s intellectual “tunnels” have been operating in plain sight for many years. Under the aegis of “Israel Apartheid Week” and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, vicious anti-Zionism has been a campus fixture since 2001, when the World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa erupted into a “festival of hate” against Jews. After decades of aggressive Israel-bashing, Palestinians have been elevated throughout western educational systems to the summit of intersectional victimhood. Those indoctrinated in this hierarchy over the last 25 years consider it a duty and a virtue to demonize Zionism as an original historical sin. October 7 popped the cork on that long-seething volcano.
Throughout the past year, we’ve seen hostage posters vandalized, Jewish schoolchildren bullied, Jewish-owned businesses attacked, Jewish neighbourhoods tormented, Jewish institutions burned and shot at. Downtowns are routinely plagued by foul-mouthed protesters shrieking mantras that call for Israel’s elimination. University campuses have tolerated long-term encampments, Judenrein except for Jews who earn their laissez-passer with a denunciation of Israel.
It’s getting worse. On Saturday in Toronto, a demonstration featured Hezbollah flags, banners extolling violence against Israel and portraits of the (recently eliminated) Hezbollah leader and arch-terrorist Hassan Nasrallah. Last Sunday in Montreal, a band of black-garbed protesters attacked Concordia University and smashed several downtown store windows. During a foot chase, one even threw Molotov cocktails in the direction of police, an ominous escalation.
More ominous in my opinion: Post-October 7, we saw the emergence at rallies and on western social media of the image of a Jewish star being dumped into a trash can accompanied by the words “Keep the world clean” — for years a meme favoured by Hamas, inspired by the Nazis.
The Nazis used the image and words in their propaganda to normalize the idea that Jews, like vermin, were a hygiene threat requiring drastic action to preserve the nation’s health. That such messages are tolerated in the public forum points to a growing acceptance of outright eradicationist antisemitism as a “respectable” opinion to hold, even among supposedly enlightened people in fields such as mental health, as evidenced by anti-Zionist blacklists targeting Jewish members of the profession.
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October 6, 2024
Will the President Abolish Democracy? – Rise of Hitler 03, March 1930
World War Two
Published 5 Oct 2024In the March 1930 Issue of the Weimar Wire Chancellor Muller resigns, the coalition government collapses, and Heinrich Brüning tries to build a new cabinet amidst street violence and political chaos. With the Nazis and Communists gaining strength, will Brüning succeed, or is the Weimar Republic heading for disaster?
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September 22, 2024
How to Make a Nazi Martyr – Rise of Hitler 02, February 1930
World War Two
Published 21 Sep 2024In this issue of the Weimar Wire, we dive deep into the critical events of February 1930. Political violence continues to claim victims on the streets, the future Polish-German relationship is up in the air, the other powers bicker at the London Naval conference, all the while, the current government struggles to fill a ginormous budget hole.
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September 20, 2024
How Popular Was Hitler?
World War Two
Published 19 Sep 2024In the summer of 1940, Hitler was at the peak of his popularity as he conquered Germany’s enemies seemingly at will. But just how quickly did this approval decline as the war turned further and further against Germany? What did the Germans think of him by the end of the war? Is there any love left for Hitler in postwar Germany? Today Spartacus answers these questions.
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September 16, 2024
Anger sells – “Words like ‘wrong’, ‘bad’, ‘awful’, ‘hate’, ‘sick’, ‘fight’, and ‘scary’ each predict a 2.3% increase in click-through rates”
Rob Henderson explains the incentives that lead to provoking as much anger as possible among readers (and especially voters):
It seems like people are angrier than ever. According to a poll by CBS News, 84 percent of Americans believe we are angrier than previous generations. Another survey recently found that nine in ten Americans can name either a recent news event or something about American politics that made them angry, while only half could identify a recent news event or something about American politics that made them proud.
What explains this feeling of rage? One noteworthy reason is that exploiting anger is politically convenient.
The strategic use of anger in politics has transformed it from a natural human emotion into a weapon of division, with far-reaching consequences for our social cohesion and democratic governance.
According to Steven Webster, author of “American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics” and assistant professor of political science at Indiana University, “Anger provides ample benefits to those politicians who are able to use it most skillfully”.
Indeed, across political settings, angry people are more likely to vote than those who are not angry. In other words, politicians who can stoke anger can use it to motivate their base. The angrier voters are at the opposing party, the more likely they are to show up to the polls to support their own party. As Webster puts it, “angry voters are loyal voters”.
Political anger has consequences that extend beyond how Americans view their governing institutions or the opposing political party. When American voters are angry about politics, they are inclined to avoid social interactions or social events where they are likely to come into contact with those whose political leanings differ from their own.
In a chapter titled “Emotions in Politics” published last year, the psychologists Florian van Leeuwen and Michael Bang Peterson suggest that along with other emotions, anger “seems to be a distinct strategy for increasing what one is entitled to in the minds of others”.
Provoking rage against selected groups is an effective way to promote unity in politics. Today, many Americans across the political spectrum are encouraged to feel they are being victimized. It’s no coincidence that one of Donald Trump’s go-to lines on the campaign trail is “They’re laughing at us”. Being laughed at induces humiliation, which often quickly transforms into rage.
In a notable historical illustration of a political movement using anger as a limitless source of ideological fuel, consider the case of the “Recalling Bitterness” campaign in Maoist China. In the 1960s, the communist dictator Mao Zedong grew worried that ordinary Chinese citizens were developing lukewarm attitudes about the socialist revolution. In response, the regime forced people into rituals in which they publicly announced how bad life was before they had been liberated. Mao ordered writers and artists to rewrite history through the lens of class struggle to suit the needs of his political agenda. Regime officials held meetings encouraging peasants to describe how much better life was now compared to pre-liberation, hoping to convince them that the revolution’s successes outnumbered its failures. The “devils” here were reactionaries, landlords, rich farmers, and counterrevolutionaries. Documenting the rituals of the Recalling Bitterness campaign, the historian Guo Wu has written, “Only poor peasants were allowed to speak; former landlords and rich peasants were silenced”.
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September 8, 2024
Hitler’s Victory in Thüringen – Rise of Hitler 01
World War Two
Published 7 Sep 2024In this issue of the Weimar Wire, we dive deep into the critical events of January 1930. Political violence in the streets, uncertainty over the nation’s very character and Nazis entering a governing coalition provide a veritable treasure trove of political intrigue, hidden aspirations, and grand schemes.
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August 21, 2024
The pro-Kamala coup
At UnHerd, Edward Luttwak walks through the steps behind the scenes that led to Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic Party’s Presidential candidate for the 2024 election:
We are stuck with the French phrase coup d’état because nothing else describes so well the sudden removal of an old ruler by secret manoeuvrings — and their replacement with a chosen successor who happens to be endowed with every possible virtue. Of course, Kamala Harris is not a dictator because she must still face a nationwide election. But secret manoeuvrings did make her the presidential candidate of her Democratic Party, a position that is also intended to be filled by primary elections up and down the country before delegates agree on the victor at the Party Convention.
Nor was her vice-presidency enough to secure her candidacy. Far from it, given the unpromising electoral record of that most peculiar office, not inaccurately described as “not worth a bucket of warm spit” by John Nance Garner, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president. In fact, in all of American history, only seven vice presidents were elected to the presidency (eight replaced a dead president). This reflects the habitual role of vice presidents: emphatically not presidents-in-waiting but rather politicos serving as symbolic figures who are selected to attract voters that the president cannot attract with his policies.
[…]
What happened next could not possibly have occurred if there were not a single directing hand behind the scenes. Suddenly, the very same voices from Nancy Pelosi down, who had just told the American people that Biden was fit and ready to win in the upcoming elections and rule for four more years, said the very opposite: that Biden should immediately announce his withdrawal from the elections. Nor is it any mystery who pulled the switch: Barack Obama, the only American President of recent times who has continued to live in Washington DC after leaving the White House — and it is not for the Potomac river-fishing that he has stayed there.
[…]
Obama had definitely not wanted Harris in that position, fearing that she would come under attack for her San Francisco career launched by an older mayor who was also her romantic partner. After Biden had locked himself into his vice-presidential choice of a black woman, Obama proposed his former National Security Advisor, Susan Rice. But even the faithful Biden could not accept that: in his own eight vice-presidential years, Biden often tried to influence foreign policy only to be overruled by Obama’s appointees, who knew very much less than he did after his decades of attentive service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And none was more arrogant with him than Rice. And so, even faithful Biden would not accept her, which meant that Obama could ensure Biden’s withdrawal, but not his replacement with his own candidate.
So, what is the party left with? Because Kamala Harris did not win even one primary, and her vice-presidential role was more unremarkable than most, it is possible, just possible, that this week’s gathering will not unfold as a Chinese Communist Party Congress, and one or more delegates will call for a choice. And because there are in fact candidates ready and waiting among the Democratic governors, eight of them women, an open convention need not devolve into chaos or coup — but rather into a democratic election.
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August 20, 2024
QotD: The printing press was to the Reformation what social media is in the Current Year
Consider the Reformation. I’m in no way qualified to walk you through all the various doctrinal issues, but in this case a superficial analysis is not only sufficient, it’s actually better. Instead of getting lost in the theological weeds, I want to focus on the process. So let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that nothing Luther said was all that original, theologically — you can find pretty much any tenet of “Lutherism” (as it then was) somewhere in the past, often among the Church Fathers (the “double predestination” that drove Calvinists insane is straight out of St. Augustine, for example). Wyclif, Hus, Nicholas of Cusa, Marsilius of Padua, all those guys were proto-Luthers, at least in part.
The thing about Luther, then, wasn’t what he said, so much as how he said it.
Martin Luther was the world’s first spin doctor. Though he insisted for a long time that his famous 95 Theses were, and were always intended to be, a scholastic debate between clergymen, Luther mastered the use of printed propaganda. His opponents soon followed, or tried to, in an ever-increasing spiral of printed viciousness. Mutatis mutandis, the exchanges between Luther, Erasmus, Thomas More (to say nothing of a thousand lesser lights) and their opponents all sound shockingly Current Year. They’re snarky and waspish at best, grotesque ad hominem at worst. Modern flame wars have nothing on the way Thomas More and William Tyndale tore into each other, for instance, and More and Tyndale were rank amateurs compared to Luther.
As with the Current Year, where being first on social media is the only criterion that matters, so the printing press injected something very like “hot takes” into the late-Medieval intellectual atmosphere. If you tried to respond to your opponents the old-fashioned way — with closely reasoned, heavily cited arguments, on parchment, hand-copied by monks — you might win the intellectual battle … 500 years later, among historians who thank you for providing such a useful glimpse into late-Medieval mentalités, but in your own time you’d get fired at best, get burned at the stake at worst, if you didn’t respond instantly, in kind.
The printing press, in other words, represented a quantum leap in the velocity of information. Those who grasped its fundamentals prospered, while those who fell behind perished. King Henry VIII, for instance, fatally damaged his cherished intellectual reputation when he deigned to attack to Luther in person. Luther hit back with a tirade that wouldn’t be out of place on Twitter1, and Henry responded in kind, and now the king, who was hip-deep in self-inflicted shit by that point, had to drop the fight. Having been publicly abused by a mere ex-monk, he had to quit the field with his tail between his legs.
Severian, “Velocity of Information”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-10.
1. Again, mutatis mutandis. Though this sounds to modern ears like an abject apology on Luther’s part (“especially as I am the offscouring of the world, a mere worm who ought only to live in contemptuous neglect”, etc.), in context it’s a vicious attack. For one thing, what’s a great king like Henry doing responding to a “mere worm”? And Henry had to know, since Wolsey did nothing without his master’s orders … except everyone had heard the rumors that Henry was just a dimwitted playboy, and Cardinal Wolsey was really the king in all but name, so maybe he didn’t know. Either way Henry, who prided himself on being an intellectual, was a fool. That’s the kind of thing that would get you executed in the 16th century, and here’s this “mere worm” publishing it, for all the world to see, with no possibility of reprisal from a supposedly puissant monarch.
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August 13, 2024
Feelings … nothing more than (climate) feelings …
Have you been metaphorically beaten over the head about your climate sins? Your carbon buttprint? You know your very existence is a threat to Mother Gaia, right? Well, Katharina van Bronswijk is worried that you’ll stop listening to the neverending lectures about you and your evil externalities:
Climatism is a political programme bound to a broad social movement. Most of its momentum comes not from The Science or The Experts, but from diffuse cultural forces that we should probably try to understand, if only because they are driving our entire civilisation straight into the ground. Against all advice, I will therefore steer the plague chronicle into this ridiculous quagmire of leftoid green babble, with a look at our first lesson in Unlearnings, namely “Unlearn Repression”.
This superficial and disorganised essay is the work of an infuriating young woman named Katharina van Bronswijk. She’s a psychotherapist best known for her 2022 book, Climate in Our Heads. Fear, Anger, Hope: What the Ecological Crisis is Doing to Us. It belongs to that genre of inevitably unreadable monographs, in which the author herself appears on the cover, looking windswept, pioneering and undaunted:
“Climate feelings” are van Bronswijk’s niche in the extremely crowded enterprise of CO2-bothering. In “Unlearn Repression”, she argues that we should not suppress our negative feelings about climate change, but rather embrace them in constructive ways on behalf of the planet.
Now, van Bronswijk is the kind of deeply unoriginal person who just says the same things over and over. Everything she writes in “Unlearn Repression” flows directly from Climate in our Heads; she’s been digesting, reheating and reworking this same overboiled intellectual artichoke for almost two years now, through various media interviews and even in this English-language TEDx Talk. Throughout this woman’s work is the vague anxiety that the climatists have perhaps overdone it with doom and gloom, and that a lot of people have had enough of hearing about a climate apocalypse that never quite happens.
Van Bronswijk is naturally very dumb, but more than that she is painfully condescending, oblivious, verbose and just awash in litres of estrogen. I defy anyone to read her work and not come away from it a raging misogynist. This odious overpromoted schoolmarm belongs out of sight in a childcare centre teaching young children the alphabet. Perhaps she should also be in a choir, or part of a local environmental club dedicated to collecting litter in parks. That our society has denied van Bronswijk and so many others like her these proper outlets for their instincts and instead pushed them into public activism and intellectual production itself explains a great deal of what is wrong with the world.
“Unlearn Repression” opens with some autobiographical details, because of course everything van Bronswijk talks about is all about van Bronswijk. Like so many Germans of her generation, she was radicalised by school climate propaganda – specifically, by her teacher’s fateful screening of that classic propaganda film, An Inconvenient Truth:
Back then … I was happy for the welcome distraction of watching a film instead of doing normal lessons. But afterwards I was shocked and asked my mum for answers to all the questions and challenges. She didn’t have any solutions for me, how could she? I was alarmed and started to think about the impending consequences of climate change and what could be done about it. I found approaches in newsletters from NGOs and by reading up on animal and environmental protection … That was when my dream bubble burst and I realised: the world is unfair and, unlike all the Disney stories of my childhood, there will be no single hero*ine who saves the world. And there is no magical or technical miracle solution either.
Al Gore’s film so terrified the young van Bronswijk, that for a while she retreated into conspiratorial theories about why climate change is not happening, which qualifies our crayon psychotherapist to pronounce upon the psychology of those who deny the climate. This deeply evil and irrational movement is driven primarily by “white men”, because they “still enjoy most of the privileges in our society, and therefore have the most to lose”.
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August 2, 2024
QotD: The essential target of ideological propaganda
The Third Reich didn’t last long enough to figure it out, but in their 70-odd years the Soviets learned that “the masses” can be more or less ignored. They’re no threat to the regime. Your average Soviet “citizen” — Ivan Sixpack — would follow pretty much any rule, so long as he had a steady and predictable life course. That’s no slander on Ivan; it’s just the way people are. If you want proof, go look around — if I’d told you, back in the summer of 2019, about all the masks and the social distancing and the lockdowns and everything else, you’d have laughed at me. “There will be blood in the streets! No one will stand for it!”
The reaction of “the masses” (a term I hate; it’s patronizing, but it’ll have to do) to COVID was instructive: They either did as they were told, with nary a peep of complaint, or they simply ignored it … with nary a peep of complaint. From the rulers’ perspective, either one was fine, because they’re functionally the same thing. We all know that whatever the ruling class thought they were going to get out of the Kung Flu panic — and it’s not at all clear; we’ll get there — “public health”, as in the actual health of real members of the public, was nowhere on the list. As with “climate change” and all their other “crises”, their highly visible behavior showed how seriously they took it — which was, of course, not at all.
Indeed, from the rulers’ perspective, it was actually better that some large fraction of the underclass didn’t comply — that way, the mental energy of the Karens was channeled down, not up. Karen could start complaining about Whitmer, Newsom, and the rest not living by their own rules, and had she done so, that might’ve posed a problem for the rulers. But thanks to the maskless proles (and, of course, asshole class traitors like me), Karen always had a bunch of much softer targets to hector.
That’s the function of “propaganda” in my sense. It’s designed to create a narrative, the purpose of which is to channel dissatisfaction down the social scale.
What the Soviets learned, and their SJWs successors have internalized, is that you really only need a small cadre of “middle class” (for lack of a better term) producers to keep things running. Those are the targets of narrative-reinforcing propaganda.
Indeed, it’s only a subset of that already small fraction that needs to be propagandized. As the Soviets quickly learned, true technical experts are more or less ideology-proof. That’s because their technical expertise takes up all their time; they’ve oriented their personalities around it. You could read a novel like Red Plenty to get the sense of it (Z Man has a review somewhere if you want it), but I suggest a much easier path: Watch the fun old movie Boiler Room, with Giovanni Ribisi, Vin Diesel, and in a brief but memorable scene, Ben Affleck. I’m sure that seems odd — it’s a movie about sell-at-all-costs stockbrokers, based loosely on Jordan Belfort’s Stratton Oakmont scam; what could be more explicitly capitalist?
But note how they live: They own ludicrous cars and live in huge mansions, but the cars hardly get driven, and the mansions are unfurnished. There’s a scene where they all get together in Vin Diesel’s living room to watch a movie (Wall Street, natch). There’s a huge tv and a couch, but everything else is boxed up, and they’re eating takeout pizza. Giovanni Ribisi says something like “did you just move in this weekend?” and the other guys say no, he’s been living here for years, he just never got around to unpacking his stuff. That’s the mindset of the true technical intelligentsia. Those stockbrokers think they’re doing it for the money, and so they have the outward trappings of rich people, but they’re really doing it because that’s who they are — they’d be just as deliriously happy competing for subway tokens or scraps of confetti, so long as they had one more scrap than the guy on the next phone.
Given that, the only group that really needs to be propagandized is — you guessed it — Karen. The entire narrative of COVID was very obviously designed by hormonal cat ladies, for hormonal cat ladies. Cards on the table: Though I thought Kung Flu was overblown and ridiculous from the beginning, since I know a little history, I didn’t base my conclusions on my reading in the medical journals. I didn’t read medical journals, and unless you’re a doctor I bet you didn’t, either. My opposition to the Kung Flu panic was entirely visceral: THIS IS MEAN GIRL SHIT.
Severian, “Narrative Collapse III: Magic Masks”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-07.
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July 31, 2024
“You really can’t hate them enough”
Elizabeth Nickson links to a short excerpt from Michael Walsh’s introduction to his upcoming Against the Corporate Media:
Today’s journalists now openly celebrate the death of objectivity, arguing that reporters have biases like everybody else, so why pretend that they don’t? In clear violation of their own — and now very much outmoded — Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, they happily ignore such tenets as:
- Identify sources clearly.
- Consider sources’ motives before promising anonymity.
- Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
- Expose unethical conduct in journalism, including within their organizations.
Thus, after nearly a century’s consensus about journalistic best practices, we have come full circle to the days of naked partisanship that marked the earliest American newspapers. Gossip has become news, journalistic crusades are fabricated out of whole cloth and attributed to anonymous sources as justification. It’s noteworthy that the word “objectivity” nowhere appears in the current SPJ code, which was revised in 2014. Why would it? Objectivity has become the mortal enemy of the current vogue for “explanatory” or “advocacy” journalism — otherwise generally known as propaganda.
The transformation of journalism from rank advocacy to lukewarm “objectivity” and back to even ranker political propaganda (nearly all news stories today are couched in political terms, including those about pop music and sports) is one of the principal subjects of this book. Accordingly we have assembled a corps of forty-two journalists — some grizzled veterans, some newcomers, some of whose primary occupations lie in the wider fields of book publishing, fiction, non-fiction, television, and even Hollywood — to analyze the startling changes that have come over the profession in our lifetimes.
You really can’t hate them enough.
Even greater than the abandonment of “objectivity” as a pernicious influence on journalism is the internet, the great destroyer of printed periodicals, which has laid waste to the newspaper and magazine industry and has fallen under the control of the social-media giants, such as X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, and is now subject to favoritism and even censorship by near-monopolies like Google, a search engine that also now controls visual media via its ownership of YouTube. Whether the patrician Walter Lippmann would have admired his wishful handiwork now that it is a reality is open to question, but surely he would celebrate the intrusion of the American federal government, along with governments around the world, into both de facto and de jure informational control of cyberspace. In many countries around the world, the press and attendant broadcast media are now directly and unabashedly controlled by government entities which, in many cases, openly fund and censor them.
Even in a work of this length, it is of course impossible to touch upon every aspect of the current state of the media. From the point of view of one who has labored in it, off and on, for more than half a century, it is parlous and getting worse. Ask someone with less than ten years’ experience in the field and you may well — very likely will — get a different answer: that it’s liberated, responsive, unfettered. Still, my work as a historian has convinced me of the truth of Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr’s famous axiom, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (The Paris-born Karr, who lived from 1808 to 1890, was, of course, a journalist himself, in addition to being a critic, novelist, and flora-culturalist. But that was back in the day when “journalists” were men of accomplishment in other fields.) That is to say, the fundamental things apply in all walks of human endeavor, and among these things is mankind’s innate desire to convince others of the rightness of his position on any given subject. The question always has been: What’s the best way to go about it?
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July 27, 2024
More Kamalamentum
At Spiked, Fraser Myers examines what he calls “Kamala’s Ministry of Truth”:
“Kamala Harris” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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Did I just fall out of a coconut tree? How else to explain the dizziness so many of us are feeling at the speed of Kamala Harris’s coronation – and at the contortions now being performed to present her as the saviour of the beleaguered Democrats, if not of American democracy itself.
Within 48 hours of Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the US presidential race on Sunday, Vice-President Harris had clinched enough delegates, donors and Democratic power-brokers to ensure her an unchallenged, uncontested path to becoming the Democratic nominee to face Donald Trump this autumn. The last dominos to fall, Barack and Michelle Obama, today offered a full-throated endorsement of Harris, claiming she has the “vision, the character, and the strength that this critical moment demands”.
Since Harris emerged as the frontrunner, the Democrats’ media cheerleaders appear to have been gripped by a nasty bout of Kamalamania. “Kamala Harris will be the 47th President of the United States. Democracy will survive”, declared one Hollywood celeb. She brings the “political power of joy” and “effervescent vibes” to US politics, according to a New York Times columnist. CNN reporters have been gushing over her choice of hoodie and sneakers. As Jenny Holland wrote on spiked earlier this week, the media are eager to present Harris as “Martin Luther King, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, all rolled into one”.
We need to remember who we’re talking about here. The newly anointed Democratic nominee was someone few believed could win the presidency, only a few weeks ago. Indeed, this is widely understood to be behind the Obamas’ hesitancy to back her – and Biden’s own reluctance to hand over the baton to his veep.
It’s not hard to see why. Harris is a politician who exudes negative charisma. She speaks like a cross between a Calfornian self-help guru – her favoured aphorism is “What can be, unburdened by what has been” – and a primary-school teacher who enjoys a few too many glasses of wine at lunchtime. She laughs and cackles at inopportune moments, often to herself. At times, her speech is as incoherent as the mentally frail Joe Biden’s. Who could forget her nonsensical remarks last year at a White House function in which she asked: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” Good luck translating that into English for swing voters in Pennsylvania.
We know that Harris is unpopular with the public, because she has been tested before. Her campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2020 had to be suspended two months before the first primary vote in order to avoid total humiliation at the ballot box. Nationally, Harris was polling at just three per cent. Even in her home state of California, she could only muster eight per cent. Yet now she is about to become the Democratic contender for the White House, with zero input from the public or the party grassroots.
At Founding Questions, Severian responds to a few questions from readers about the Kamala Harris candidacy and what it might indicate about what is happening behind the scenes among the Democratic movers and shakers:
My read is that 2024 is going to be Fortified to hell and back — that’s a certainty — but the extent of the Fortification, and probably its eventual outcome, is tied to the Robber Barons. I agree with William Briggs or whoever it is who suggests a “Thermidorian faction” (I prefer “competent fraction”) of Juggs within the Apparat who are trying desperately to slam on the brakes. IF they can do it — and I’m honestly not sure they can, not at this late date — it’ll be because the Robber Barons put the resources behind it.
I get a sense that there are more than a few Robber Barons making their peace with the BOM. There are, of course, a lot more Robber Barons who hate him and will never reconcile themselves to him … but that doesn’t mean they want Kamala Harris as President. As I wrote in the comments yesterday, if they’d wanted Harris as President, she’d be President by now. Pretty much all the Uniparty’s current problems go away if Biden resigns the Presidency, and if they can force him to drop his reelection bid, they can certainly force his resignation — he’s out in five months no matter what, so why not pass the reins to Harris? She’d be in a far, far stronger position going into 2024 as the incumbent.
No, really. I know that sounds badly wrong to people in contact with Reality, but look at it from the dumbass perspective. The Media has been telling us for four years that the Biden Administration is the greatest ever. Despite your lying eyes, there’s no inflation, no border crisis, no crime problem, and so forth. Harris is going to try to take credit for that on the campaign trail, of course, but it rings a weensy bit hollow coming from a Vice-President. From Madam President xzyrzelf, though? Different story. At least, that’s how the dumbfucks out there in Normie-land would see it, and those are the stupid bastards who will be voting in the fall.
As Vice-President, she gets no credit for the Biden Administration’s accomplishments (I know, I know, stop laughing) … but she gets tarred with all their failures, plus her fuckups as “border czar” (that’s gonna be fun), plus her role in the very obvious and ongoing coverup of Dementia Joe’s galloping dementia.
Make her President, and all that shit goes away. For her first official act, she appoints someone, anyone, as the new “border czar”, and tells that persyn to fall on xzheyr sword. Or, better yet, just never mention the border again. Tell the Media to blast nothing but Historic First Female President!! shit from now until Fortification Day. They will be happy to comply, and it’ll drive most of the bad news off the front page.
This is such a no-brainer that there are only two possible explanations for why they haven’t done it: Either they’re even more terrifyingly stupid than they seem, and so it never occurred to them; or it did occur to them, but Kamala Harris is such a repulsive retard that they can’t risk it — despite it all, Chomo Joe and his galloping dementia are still, somehow, the safer bet.
My guess is that, as Pickle Rick posited the other day, they all give her a pro-forma endorsement, then quietly pull the funding plug. They all pretty much have to endorse her at this point, if for no other reason than the Spiteful Mutants are already going to go apeshit in Chicago; an actual primary fight might burn the city to the ground.
But who knows? These are Juggs. Plus, as I’ve written, this is their moment — every grievance group in AINO will be going for it, as the Uniparty in general, and Harris in particular, will have to promise them the earth and stars to keep them onside. Consider that she has to get both the Bagels and their shekels, and the Pali-bros, in order to make the whole thing go. That would test the political skill of a Metternich, to say nothing of a woman who literally slept her way to the top. She can’t blow ’em all, so she’s going to have to deliver the goods in some other way.
It’ll be a hoot, that’s for sure. Keeping an eye on the funding is probably the best indicator we have.
And in an answer to a different reader:
Welcome to Late Soviet America. Expect a lot more of this, as obvious, ham-handed repression is SOP for flailing, collapsing regimes. We’ve entered the Andropov / Chernenko phase of the festivities, when the phrase “decrepit old man” refers to both the “leader” and his nation. And yeah, I realize that makes Kamala Harris the fake and gay Gorbachev, but that’s actually pretty close — Gorby, too, destroyed what was left of his country because he really believed in all that “openness” and “democracy” bullshit they taught him at the Higher Party Academies. Harris is a far worse moonbat race-baiter than even Bathhouse Barry ever dreamed of being; we’ll get the whole Gorby-Yeltsin-we’re fucked decade in about six weeks once she’s Fortified into office.
And on the power politics uncertainties for both America’s allies and adversaries when it’s not clear exactly who is in charge in Washington DC, the temptation to press a temporary advantage may become overwhelming:
Had Brandon resigned, it wouldn’t be ideal for the Juggs — Harris is still largely holding the bag for Chomo’s failures — but it’d be a hell of a lot better than this, because at least there is someone nominally in charge. Putin or Xi or whoever can pick up the phone and demand to speak to President Harris, and at the very least, he can be assured that President Harris will remember their discussion a few hours later. She might decide to do some incredibly stupid shit, of course — in fact that’s almost guaranteed — but at least Xi, Putin, whoever will know that it’s a bad decision …
… and not just some random drooling lunacy by a guy who thinks it’s 1971 and he’s sticking it to Corn Pop. If anything, the problem just got worse, because they’ve all but openly admitted what everybody already knew: We’re under the Do Long Bridge. There ain’t no fuckin’ CO. But now, instead of just ignoring Harris as per usual when decisions have to be made by … well, by whomever, now they pretty much have to loop her stupid ass in, even though she has no official power to make anything happen. They’ve added yet another layer of retarded dysfunction to an already FUBAR process.
And at The Free Press, Suzy Weiss explains a few Kamalamemes that her campaign has decided to “lean into” (note that the rest is behind a paywall):
→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way — and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant — that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.
That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—”You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened by what has been” — as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.
And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.
Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool”.
→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-Eleven. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe … well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story”. The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.
Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.
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July 9, 2024
QotD: “No official Propaganda Department has ever been half as effective as Twitter and Facebook”
Our overlords figured that out, give credit where it’s due. No official Propaganda Department has ever been half as effective as Twitter and Facebook. But that’s a problem, too, as we’re starting to see. The problem with freelance propaganda is the free market problem of marginal utility.
Facebook and Twitter are SJW cesspools. Everyone knows this. Even your sweet old granny, who is only on Facebook to exchange pie recipes and knitting ideas, knows this, because the #WokeStapo came for knitting years back. When the “trust and safety council” goes so far as to ban the sitting President of the United States, even hermits living in remote Himalayan caves got the message — toe the Party line on social media, or else.
This reduces the value of ALL information on social media to, effectively, zero. Sure, it might be true — and propaganda, as we know, works better the closer to the truth it steers — but given that they’ve even gone after knitting, for pete’s sake, means that any even halfway sorta quasi rational person assumes everything on social media is nothing but propaganda.
Severian, “If They Were Clever”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-08.
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