C.J. Hopkins's Blog, page 5

So, my trial for thoughtcrimes in New Normal Germany takes place next Tuesday, January 23rd. It will likely be a one-day affair. It’s open to the public, so, if you’re in Berlin, you can come and watch at the Berlin District Court, Turmstraße 91, Room 371. The proceedings are scheduled to begin at 12:00 noon.

Yes, that’s right, the German authorities are actually putting me on trial for my thoughtcrimes. I stand accused of criminal tweeting because I mocked the New Normal German authorities and pointed out one of their many lies. Here are the two thoughtcrime Tweets at issue.

The one on the left reads, “The masks are ideological-conformity symbols. That is all they are. That is all they have ever been. Stop acting like they have ever been anything else, or get used to wearing them.” The one on the right is a quote by Karl Lauterbach, who, believe it or not, is still the Health Minister of Germany. It reads “The masks always send out a signal.”

The image is from the cover art of my book The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021), which was banned in Germany by Amazon, Inc. two days after I tweeted those Tweets … which was also when the German authorities launched the criminal investigation that led to my prosecution and instructed Twitter to censor the Tweets.

Let me back up a bit, and tell you the whole story.

What happened is, I tweeted those two Tweets, and they came to the attention of the Hessen CyberCompetenceCenter (“Hessen 3C”), a department of another department of the Interior Ministry of the Federal State of Hesse. The Hessen CyberCompetenceCenter then reported my Tweets to Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt), which launched a criminal investigation of me.

Also, the Hessen CyberCompetenceCenter instructed Twitter to censor my two Tweets, which Twitter did, and sent me this notice on August 30, 2022.

One day earlier, on August 29, Amazon had banned my book in Germany. I don’t have hard evidence of communication between the German authorities and Amazon yet, but … well, it’s obvious what happened, isn’t it?

The Hessen CyberCompetenceCenter is an official “partner” of the German “National Cyber Defense Center” (Cyber-AZ), based in Bonn, which, according to the Federal Criminal Police Office website, “is not an independent authority, but represents a common, cross-agency and cross-institutional platform.” Cyber-AZ was founded in 2011 as part of the implementation of the Federal Government’s Cyber Security Strategy (CSS).

The “core authorities” of Cyber-AZ are as follows:

Federal Office for the Military Shielding ServiceFederal Criminal Police OfficeFederal Office for Information SecurityFederal Office of the Constitution ProtectionFederal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster AssistanceBundeswehr command Cyber Cyberand Information SpaceFederal PoliceFederal Intelligence Service

The Federal Office of the Constitution Protection (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV) is essentially the German FBI. And the Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND) is … well, just what it sounds like. Here’s a little tidbit from the BfV website …

“[The BfV’s] main tasks are to monitor and analyse anti-constitutional activities by right- and left-wing extremists and extremist foreigners in Germany and to prevent espionage activities by other countries … The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution works closely with its counterparts at state level and with the other German intelligence services (i.e., the Federal Intelligence Service and Military Counterintelligence Service) as necessary.”

This is the formidable “security” apparatus that has been brought to bear against my Tweets, which allegedly threaten the German constitution by pointing out the German government’s lies about masks and mocking the Minister of Health.

Look, I know what you’re probably thinking, that is, if you’re one of my non-German readers. You’re thinking this Orwellian apparatus is uniquely German and has nothing to do with you. And, OK, you kind of have a point, and you don’t. The structures in Germany and the USA, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, are different, but the game is the same. If you don’t believe me, I suggest you read up on the reporting of this story by Matt Taibbi at Racket News, and Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag at Public (yes, I am persona non grata at Public, but that has nothing to do with the value of their work).

Matt, Mike, and Alex have mostly reported on what Mike dubbed the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” i.e., the US “Thought Police” apparatus, which is natural, as they’re writing for an American audience. But this is not just an American story. And it isn’t a story about Red/Blue politics. And it isn’t a story about “Cultural Marxism,” or “Wokeness,” or “Libtards,” or other such distractions. It’s a story about the evolution of the global ideological/power system that came into being about 30 years ago, and that is gradually going totalitarian on us.

I’ve been covering this story for many years now, satirically and sometimes not so satirically. I’m not going to reiterate all that here. You can read my essays on my blog and my Substack (that is, until Substack is destroyed, like Parler), or you can read my books, unless you live here in Germany. The point is, the global-capitalist system that controls the entire planet we live on is going totalitarian on us, conducting a global “clear-and-hold” operation, cracking down on internal resistance — any and all forms of internal resistance — and it wants us to know this is what it is doing. The system — no, not a conspiracy of bad guys — the system has been broadcasting this message, loud and clear, for a number of years.

The message is, “We, The Powers That Be, are done playing grab-ass. Get in line. Shut the fuck up and follow orders, or we will rain All Holy Hell down on you.” The message is, “Screw Your Freedom!” The message is, “Screw Your Democratic Rights! Screw the Rule of Law! This is the New Normal! We will do whatever we fucking want, and there is nothing you can do about it.”

If you’re having trouble hearing the message, you might want to have a look at this incredibly long thread I compiled, for some reason, in March and April of 2020 …

Or maybe just ask the people in Gaza …

… I think they’re probably getting the message.

Or ask Julian Assange, or Donald Trump, or anyone else that The Powers That Be have decided they need to make an example of … yes, even a little fish like me.

Anyway, I’ll be writing more about that, all that global-capitalist totalitarian stuff, perhaps in my German prison cell. According to the original “Order of Punishment” (I kid you not, that’s what it is called), I was sentenced to 60 days in jail or a fine of 3,600 Euros, but now, because I demanded a trial, the judge can come up with a whole new sentence.

We’ll see how things play out next Tuesday.

Whatever happens, one thing I am looking forward to at my trial is hearing the Berlin State Prosecutor explain how what I did in my Tweets (i.e., displaying a swastika for one of the purposes expressly allowed in Germany) was a “crime,” but when German newspapers do exactly the same thing, which they frequently do, the exceptions to the swastika-ban apply.

See, that’s the funny thing about global-capitalist totalitarianism … the authorities can’t go openly fascist. They are forced to at least attempt to appear to pay lip service to democratic principles, and the rule of law, and all that good stuff, which is why they so often sound like idiots who can’t even mount a coherent argument or make an intelligible public statement.

OK, I need to go read some German legalese.

Seriously, though, if you are in Berlin and have nothing better to do next Tuesday, come on down to the Berlin District Court and meet some of the German Thought Police in person. If things go smoothly, perhaps we can all go out and get a coffee afterwards. And if not … well, maybe bring me a carton of cigarettes and a jar of Vaseline.

###

CJ Hopkins
January 16, 2024

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., or its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Substack page, or his Patreon page, or send a contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our employees up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian sci-fi novel, Zone 23, or Volumes I, II, and III of his Consent Factory Essays, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, feel free to contact him directly.

Well, that’s pretty much it for 2023 … which I’m officially dubbing The Year of The Mindfuck.

I am doing that against the advice of my attorney, who is (a) trying to keep me out of German prison for as long as possible, and (b) trying to stop me from gratuitously alienating whatever remains of my former readership and going totally broke.

I’m not making that particularly easy for him.

The thing is, no one wants to hear that they have been mindfucked. People want to hear that other people have been mindfucked. Which … they have. Other people have been thoroughly mindfucked. But that doesn’t mean that other people — i.e., the people who want to hear that other people have been mindfucked, but not that they, themselves, have been mindfucked — haven’t also been mindfucked, which is what I’ve been mostly writing about in 2023, which, as Matt Taibbi put it in a blurb for one of my books, “probably this is not a profitable life choice.”

So it goes in the political satire racket. Sometimes you are hailed as a “prophet,” other times you’re scorned as a “dissension-sowing asshole,” censored into Internet oblivion by beloved billionaire free-speech defenders, and prosecuted for trumped-up “hate crimes.” It depends which way the wind is blowing.

It hasn’t been blowing my way this year.

On top of which, I’ve been pissing into it, the wind, at more or less every opportunity. I know it’s dumb, but I can’t seem to stop. Something about watching people being mindfucked over and over again “triggers” me, or punches my buttons, or something.

But enough about me … let’s get to the mindfucking. Due to the voluminosity of it, I won’t be able to review it all in detail but I’ll try to cover most of the mindfucking highlights.

Ready? OK, here we go.

The mindfucking started in January with the birth of the Musk Cult and the whitewashing of Twitter, and the trickle of “revelations” about “mistakes that were made” during the “Covid pandemic.” The Powers That Be needed to memory-hole the story of what actually happened (and didn’t actually happen) in 2020-2022 and enshrine the official Covid narrative in history. To achieve this they needed to mindfuck some people, not the Covidian cultists who they had already mindfucked, the other people, who they hadn’t been able to mindfuck. It was obvious that we were about to be subjected to The Mother of All Limited Hangouts.

If your memory of what actually happened (and didn’t actually happen) in 2020 is little hazy, here’s an excerpt from that column, which I published in January.

“In March and April of 2020, in the course of roughly five to six weeks, the majority of societies throughout the world were transformed into pathologized-totalitarian police states. A global ‘shock-and-awe’ campaign was conducted. Constitutional rights were suspended. The masses were locked down inside their homes, where they were subjected to the most massive official propaganda blitzkrieg in human history. Goon squads roamed the streets of Europe, the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia, Asia, the Americas, and elsewhere, beating and arresting people for being outdoors without permission and not wearing medical-looking masks. Corporate media around the world informed us that life as we knew it was over … a ‘New Normal’ was coming, and we needed to get used to it. The entire official pandemic narrative was rolled out during those first few weeks. Everything. Masks. Mandatory ‘vaccines.’ ‘Vaccination passports.’ The segregation of ‘the Unvaccinated.’ The censorship and demonization of dissent. Everything. The whole ‘New Normal’ package. It was rolled out all at once, globally.”

Now, over three years later, the facts are indisputably clear to everyone but the hopelessly brainwashed. There was no global epidemiological emergency … no legitimate justification whatsoever for that initial “shock-and-awe” campaign, or the totalitarian “New Normal” it ushered into being.

However, by January of 2023, that wasn’t a problem for The Powers That Be, as most of the masses had been hopelessly brainwashed, and they would break down and start spastically gibbering at you like frightened hyenas if you confronted them with facts.

No, the problem for The Powers That Be was us, i.e., those of us who had never bought the PSYOP. By the end of 2022, we comprised what you call a sizable minority … a problematic, pissed-off, sizable minority. So we needed to be promptly and extensively mindfucked. We needed to be managed, decoyed, distracted, buried in minutiae, partial revelations, limited hangouts, official inquiries, and so on. Above all, we needed to be made to feel like we were getting revenge on The Powers That Be. And we needed to be made to feel this way without actually endangering The Powers That Be, or inconveniencing them in any significant way.

Enter Elon Musk & Co.

Yes, that’s right, Elon Musk, the multi-billionaire military contractor! At last, a savior had arrived to deliver us from the Cabal of Wokeness, and Cultural Marxism, and Globalistism! Vanquished were evil Wokian censors and shadowbanners of the “old bad” Twitter! It was Morning in America Again!

An Elon’s-ass-kissing contest ensued. Internet hucksters, social media influencers, and all manner of money-worshiping toadies competed against each other to get their lips on the Muskian anal orifice! This salacious spectacle went on for months …

Meanwhile, the sleight-of-hand artists got to work, distracting folks with groundbreaking stories like how the Pfizer Corporation had engineered THE MUTANT COMMUNIST VIRUS BIOWEAPON that had caused the pandemic that never happened and triggered THE MASS FORMATION PSYCHOSIS that prompted The Powers That Be to go bonkers and launch the PSYOP that the sleight-of-hand artists were memory-holing right before our eyes …

… or something more or less along those lines.

And then, right on cue, came the Twitter Files story! Do you recall, way back in 2008, when Obama took office, admitted that we had “tortured some folks” in Iraq, and so on, and then decided against prosecuting Bush and his crew for launching a textbook war of aggression, murdering hundreds of thousands of people, and destabilizing and restructuring the Middle East, based on a lie about WMDs? Do you recall all the limited hangouts back then? The Abu Ghraib scandal? The mea culpas? Is your memory of all that a little “hazy”? Imagine what people’s memories of “Russiagate” and “Covid” will be like in twenty years.

People’s memories don’t get hazy just by accident. If they did, The Powers That Be wouldn’t need to distract us, redirect our attention, and otherwise relentlessly mindfuck us. Which is how Class-A limited hangouts work. You feed people a juicy part of the story, so they forget about the rest of the story. You redirect their attention away from the globally-coordinated simulation of “a worldwide epidemiological emergency” and the roll-out of new totalitarian “health measures” — “health measures” that become permanent features of society, like the post-9/11 “security measures” did — with a story about US “Red/Blue” politics, government overreach, “woke” bad apples, and the so-called “Censorship Industrial Complex.”

I don’t mean to denigrate the Twitter Files story. I really don’t, and I have made that clear to Matt and other Twitter Files journalists. Had I been in their positions, I would have done the same thing. I would have gladly taken whatever Musk gave me and reported on it, exactly as they did. And, no, the Twitter Files story is not at all a “nothingburger.” It is one of the most important stories about censorship in the 21st Century so far, despite the fact that it is also a limited hangout … like Abu Ghraib and most of those other “Iraq-post-mortem” stories were.

In real life — as opposed to the Hollywood version, or the social-media version, where people are conditioned to see everything in black-and-white terms and judge everyone as “good” or “bad,” as “truth-telling heroes” or “controlled opposition” — historical events have different aspects, and sometimes even contradictory aspects. One aspect doesn’t cancel out the others.

Some people absolutely hate it when I say this, but the kind of mindfucking I’ve been writing about is not intentionally perpetrated by “bad guys.” In fact, most of it is perpetrated by “the good guys.” In other words, yes, of course the Twitter Files are a limited hangout, and part of the mindfuck, but the Twitter Files journalists are not the mindfuckers. And Elon Musk is not Mindfucker-in-Chief. The kind of mindfucking I’m talking about is not a conspiracy; it’s built into the system. It’s how the system protects itself.

Ideological systems are not just sets of interconnected components and procedures. They are organic entities, self-sustaining organisms, with survival programming, just like you and me. They react when threatened, like any other organism, like our bodies react to mutating cells, invasive pathogens, and other internal threats. They perceive (or register) these threats, and take defensive action against them. The more totalitarian the ideological system is, the more aggressive its reaction to internal threats will be.

In our global-capitalist ideological system, mindfucking is one of the primary means of dealing with internal threats. Global capitalism cannot afford to do the Orwellian boot-stomping-your-face thing, not for extended periods, anyway. It needs to maintain a simulation of “freedom,” and some semblance of “the rule of law,” so consumers will continue shopping, and not … you know, launch an armed rebellion.

Anyway, that’s the kind of mindfucking I’m talking about. It’s how the system knows exactly when to release a certain limited hangout, or when to launch an anti-Semitism panic, or an attempted Wokester coup at Free-Speech-Twitter HQ, or a Literal Russian-Agent-Hitler sequel, or when to shut down the aforementioned limited hangout for no actual reason whatsoever, or manipulate a belligerent political satirist into obsessively writing about exactly what it wants him to be writing about.

Yes, you read that last part right. If you thought I think I am immune to the mindfuckery … I don’t. I’m not. I get mindfucked too. For example, I got mindfucked into travelling to London and taking part in The Michael Shellenberger Show in June, and wasting months afterward helping to draft and gather VIP-signatories for the “Westminster Declaration,” which turned out to be the weakest popcorn fart in the history of popcorn farts.

My foray into pretentious NGO-activism did not end well …

And then I spent most of the remainder of the year obsessing over my prosecution for “Nazi hate Tweets” here in Germany and raising money for my “legal defense fund,” and so on, which, OK, there’s another example of something that is both an important matter and, at the same time, a colossal mindfuck (i.e., for me, personally, but also for people who will be bullied into censoring themselves by the example the authorities are making of me).

But that wasn’t it for the mindfucking. Oh, no, the mindfucking coup de grâce was still to come!

If The Powers That Be had consciously set out to come up with something that would hammer the final nail into the coffin of the “anti-New Normal resistance,” they couldn’t have done any better than October 7, also known as “Israel’s 9/11.” Two and a half months of 24/7 balls-out mindfuckery have broken the brains of everyone whose brains hadn’t already been broken. It started with “the 40 beheaded babies” story and “the super-suicide Hamas rocket” story, and rapidly devolved into this …

I tried to comment on the story dispassionately, and was instantly set upon by both shrieking pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian fanatics. It seems I’m both a genocidal, atrocity-denying Israel apologist and a genocidal, atrocity-denying, anti-Semitic Hamas apologist!

The neo-Roman orgy of hatred and projectile spewing of propagandistic vomitus is ongoing, as I’m sure you are aware, so I’ll spare you the gory details on that one.

My point is, the October 7 attack and Israel’s ongoing liquidation of Gaza have obliterated any remaining shred of clarity about what’s actually happening, globally, and has re-polarized the “populist” resistance to it.

The Red Team has become the new “cancel culture” mob …

And the Blue Team is “shocked and horrified” that the new totalitarianism they helped usher into being during 2020-2022 is suddenly being turned against them …

So it goes in the bug-eyed, stark raving Schizotocracy that is The New Normal Reich. One by one, opposing demographics are being mindfucked into aligning with The Powers That Be and going full-fascist, almost as if the whole global-ideological system were going totalitarian, and what it needed to do was whip the masses into a mindless, hate-drunk, frenzy of zealotry, and pit us all against each other, and then switch the sides and do it again, over and over, until we don’t trust anyone or anything, and we literally can’t even think.

But I wouldn’t worry too much about that … I’m pretty sure The Powers That Be will be happy to do our thinking for us. They are getting rather good at that, and we are getting rather good at letting them.

OK, that’s it for me for 2023 … merry mindfucked Christmas and happy mindfucked New Year!

###

CJ Hopkins
December 21, 2023

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., or its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Substack page, or his Patreon page, or send a contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our employees up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian sci-fi novel, Zone 23, or Volumes I, II, and III of his Consent Factory Essays, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, feel free to contact him directly.

Well, 2023 is almost in the books, and things couldn’t be going better for the New Normal Reich. It’s been a long, strange seven years, but we’re finally back to the Global War on Terror, which, as you may recall, was abruptly preempted in 2016 by the War on Populism, which, as you may recall, was abruptly preempted in 2020 by the Apocalyptic Pandemic, which, as you may recall, was what ushered The New Normal Reich into being and brought us full-circle.

Anyway, here we are, back in The Global War on Terror, or the War on Horror, or The War on Whatever … Islamic terrorism, Russia, Trump, disinformation, racism, hate speech, conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, anti-vaxxerism, transphobians, Communists, cultural Marxists, radical wokesters, the Cult of Musk, neo-Covidians, Zionazis, climate-change deniers, decapitated baby rapers … it doesn’t really matter. Pick an enemy and join the Roman Orgy of Hatred!

The schizotocracy couldn’t care less which side of whatever you think you are on.

Yes, that’s right, “the schizotocracy.” I’ve coined a new name for the supranational network of global corporations, nominally-sovereign governments, non-governmental governing entities, media conglomerates, oligarchs, etc., that comprise the global-capitalist system that is driving the course of events in our time. I’ve coined this new name for those of my readers who suffer apoplectic seizures whenever I write about “global capitalism” (or “GloboCap,” as I sometimes jokingly call it) and its predictable evolution into “The New Normal Reich.”

I’ll tell you about the “schizotocracy,” but, first, here’s an excerpt from an essay I wrote about that predictable evolution back in 2017 …

Tomorrow Belongs to the Corporatocracy, October 20, 2017

We haven’t really got our minds around it yet, because we’re still in the early stages of it, but we have entered an epoch in which historical events are primarily being driven, and societies reshaped not by sovereign nation states acting in their national interests but by supranational corporations acting in their corporate interests. Paramount among these corporate interests is the maintenance and expansion of global capitalism, and the elimination of any impediments thereto. Forget about the United States (i.e., the actual nation state) for a moment, and look at what’s been happening since the early 1990s. The US military’s “disastrous misadventures” in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, and the former Yugoslavia, among other exotic places (which obviously had nothing to do with the welfare or security of any actual Americans), begin to make a lot more sense.

Global capitalism, since the end of the Cold War (i.e, immediately after the end of the Cold War), has been conducting a global clean-up operation, eliminating actual and potential insurgencies, mostly in the Middle East, but also in its Western markets. Having won the last ideological war, like any other victorious force, it has been “clearing-and-holding” the conquered territory, which in this case happens to be the whole planet. Just for fun, get out a map, and look at the history of invasions, bombings, and other “interventions” conducted by the West and its assorted client states since 1990. Also, once you’re done with that, consider how, over the last fifteen years, most Western societies have been militarized, and their citizens placed under constant surveillance, and an overall atmosphere of “emergency” fostered, and paranoia about “the threat of extremism” propagated by the corporate media.

I’m not suggesting there’s a bunch of capitalists sitting around in a room somewhere in their shiny black top hats planning all of this. I’m talking about systemic development, which is a little more complex than that, and much more difficult to intelligently discuss because we’re used to perceiving historico-political events in the context of competing nation states, rather than competing ideological systems … or rather, non-competing ideological systems, for capitalism has no competition. What it has, instead, is a variety of insurgencies, the faith-based Islamic fundamentalist insurgency and the neo-nationalist insurgency chief among them. There will certainly be others throughout the near future as global capitalism consolidates control and restructures society according to its values.

None of these insurgencies will be successful.

Short some sort of cataclysm, like an asteroid strike or the zombie apocalypse, or, you know, violent revolution, global capitalism will continue to restructure the planet to conform to its ruthless interests. The world will become increasingly “normal.” The scourge of “extremism” and “terrorism” will persist, as will the general atmosphere of “emergency.” There will be no more Trumps, Brexit referendums, revolts against the banks, and so on. Identity politics will continue to flourish, providing a forum for leftist activist types (and others with an unhealthy interest in politics), who otherwise might become a nuisance, but any and all forms of actual dissent from global capitalist ideology will be systematically marginalized and pathologized.

I wrote that in October of 2017, and, no, I’m not an soothsayer or a prophet. The trajectory of global capitalism as a system has been obvious for quite some time. That is, if you could see it clearly, as opposed to through an ideological lens.

Now, let me tell you about the schizotocracy. Or, rather, let me tell you about schizophrenia, which is really just a fancy name for psychosis. I want to do that because that’s where global capitalism (or crony capitalism, or the corporatocracy, or the New Normal Reich, or cultural Marxism, or whatever you want or need to call it) is inexorably taking us, i.e., into a state of societal psychosis, so it would probably be a good idea to understand how psychosis works.

What happens when you become psychotic is, you lose your ability to participate in “reality.” It’s like being in a country where you don’t speak the language. Or trying to play a game that everyone else is playing when you don’t know the rules, or the point of the game, and no one will tell you. See, normally, “reality” is just, well, reality. It doesn’t take scare quotes. It’s just “the way it is.” But it isn’t. Reality is manufactured. Which is why what is “real” has changed throughout history. (Of course, those earlier versions of reality were wrong, and our current reality is right, and future generations will never look back on our reality as we look back on the reality of people in Medieval Europe, or ancient Rome, or Mesopotamia.)

In other words, reality is a fiction … a fiction that we all agree to believe in. But that doesn’t make it any less real. On the contrary, it is absolutely real, and absolutely necessary. It is an absolutely necessary fiction. It is what makes communication and cooperation possible. It is what makes all human society possible. As long as we forget that it is a fiction. As long as we don’t perceive it as a fiction.

Which is the problem for psychotic (or “schizophrenic”) individuals. They are unable to not perceive reality as a fiction, a work of ontological fiction in progress. They have forgotten to forget that it’s all made up — which is the price of admission to our communal “reality” — so they desperately try to interpret everything … literally everything, everything that we don’t have to interpret and just take for granted.

For example, if I ask you how your car is running (assuming that you have a car), you won’t have to wonder what I mean. You’ll trust that I am referring to your actual car, the physical automotive vehicle. But when you ask a schizo how their car is running, they may not know what you mean by “car.” Do you really mean their brain? Or the material “vehicle” in which their immaterial spirit is traveling? And why are you asking? Who are you? What are you? A “car mechanic”? Are you from “The Factory”? Or a Cosmic Repo-man? They can’t be certain.

Their mind is working to assemble a “reality,” alone — it does not get more alone — with the pieces of the old (i.e., our) “reality,” which no longer works as reality for them, because they watched it disintegrate into pieces, because they took way too much LSD, or had a psychotic breakdown due to a chemical imbalance, or inserted metal hooks into their pectoral muscles and were hoisted into the the air and hung there until the veil of maya finally dissolved … or whatever it was they did or suffered that obliterated reality for them.

Now, I don’t mean to denigrate obliterating reality. Such experiences can be enlightening, in moderation. But psychosis is a horse of a different color. The biggest danger, when reality is obliterated, is if you freak out and desperately try to impose a new reality on the obliterated reality, which it is nearly impossible not to do if reality remains obliterated for too long. The human mind can handle brief sojourns beyond the veil of maya, but it cannot live there. If it cannot return to our reality, it starts making up its own “reality” … a “reality” that it cannot describe to us, or even get us to acknowledge the existence of, because it is talking to us in a foreign language, which no one but the psychotic person understands.

In other words, psychosis is a failure to communicate. The “reality” the psychotic person is experiencing (i.e., constructing) cannot be communicated to anyone. Our reality is no less a fiction than theirs, but it is a fiction we all share, whereas the psychotic person exists alone, utterly alone, in their solitary (paranoid) “reality.” If they could get us to see what they see, think the way they think, and speak their language, they wouldn’t be psychotic, and neither would we. We would all be normal. Their “reality” would be reality.

OK, so back to the schizotocracy, which is where The New Normal Reich is taking us, which I described above as societal psychosis. And, yes, we need to talk about capitalism. We need to talk about what it does to society when people let it run amok.

Now, I want to be ultra-clear about this for those of my readers who go totally ape-shit every time I write about capitalism. I have no problem with capitalism per se. I’m not an economist. For all I know, capitalism may be the best economic system in the entire history of economic systems. I am not calling on the proletariat to rise up and seize the means of production. I am writing about capitalism as an ideology, because it’s the ideology that has become our reality, the reality of the planet Earth, which it is transforming into one big marketplace.

See, what capitalism does, if you turn it loose, when it isn’t restrained in any real way by any sort of dominant value system — e.g., a religious, or cultural, or social value system — what it does is, it transforms societies into markets, and turns everything and everyone within them into commodities. It strips societies of all other values — i.e., impediments to the free flow of capital — until nothing remains but the marketplace, where exchange value is the only value and nothing has any real value in itself, or any real meaning in itself.

And the kicker is, what capitalism does next, when it’s allowed to go hog-wild on society, is it sells the desiccated husks of people’s values back to them as lifestyle commodities. Identities, religions, political parties, sexual orientations, left, right, capitalist, anti-capitalist, whatever. They are all just interchangeable commodities. Consumer products. Leisure activities. If they aren’t, if you attempt to actually live your life according to non-global-capitalist values (like, just for example, Islam, or Christianity, or communism, or any other values that impede the unbridled flows of capital), you will quickly find yourself branded an “extremist.” Go ahead, those of you who call yourselves Christians, try this … give everything you have to the poor, chase the money-changers out of your churches. See how fast you are branded “terrorists.”

Again, for my sensitive pro-capitalist readers, I have no problem with private property, and manufacturing and buying and selling things, and all that other basic “capitalism” stuff. I’m talking about what happens when we take our hands off the reins of society, and let global capitalism run society for us. What happens is, capitalism disintegrates our values, all of our values, not just the ones you don’t like. We end up living in a global market, a global market where there are no values, and nothing means anything, because anything means anything.

We end up with societal psychosis. We end up ruled by a schizotocracy. Our reality changes from day to day, as does who we thought were our allies and adversaries, depending on the fluctuations of the market. The ideological market. The “reality” market. One day we’re all “free-speech” champions, and the next we’re screeching for censorship of speech. One day people are demonizing “the Unvaccinated,” and the next they are screeching that they are being demonized. Comparing anything to Nazi Germany is anti-Semitism, until it isn’t, and wasn’t, until it was, and then wasn’t again. Trump is Hitler. Putin is Hitler. Hamas is Hitler. Netanyahu is Hitler. Anyone who calls anyone Hitler is Hitler. Men are women. Women are Hitler. The Hamas terrorists are worse than the Nazis. Israel is worse than the Nazis. Masks work, and they don’t. Stand with Ukraine. Stand with Israel. Stand with Whatever. Listerine kills the germs that brushing can’t. Have it your way. You’re in good hands. Fly the friendly skies. And so on. Nothing and no one can be trusted. No one has any values or principles, so we’re just shrieking gibberish and slogans at each other, like corporations advertising their products on a television network that no one is watching.

And, of course, just like the psychotic individual, who desperately attempts to impose a new “reality” on the terrifying chaos of the obliterated reality from which they have been exiled, many folks are going full-blown fascist and trying to ram their “truth” down everyone else’s throat in an attempt to reestablish something, anything, resembling a functional reality … a reality that isn’t up for grabs. Other people are switching off, and withdrawing from society, overwhelmed by it all. Others are searching for someone to tell them what is really going on and what to do about it. “Leaders” are coming out of the woodwork, delivering speeches and holding seminars, explaining the problem … and who “our enemy” is.

I think you know how the rest of this story goes.

And, no, for those readers who are tempted to write me and ask, I don’t know how to stop it. Maybe, if it can be stopped, that will start with people actually talking to each other, face to face, in physical reality, people who disagree with each other, who may not particularly like each other, but who are able to sit together and talk about the state of our world without it devolving into a shrieking homicidal hate fest.

As usual, I wish I had something more hopeful to end this horrible column with … especially because it’s Christmas-time, the season of joy, and love, and all that. I don’t. And, also, I’m a little distracted preparing for my trial here in Germany for thoughtcrimes. If you are in Berlin on January 23, 12:00 PM, and want to attend the proceedings, feel free to come to the District Court. The address is Turmstraße 91. We are in Room 371. It should be interesting.

In the meantime, merry Christmas and happy holidays!

###

CJ Hopkins
December 7, 2023

Photo: Schindler’s List, Amblin Entertainment/Universal Pictures

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., or its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Substack page, or his Patreon page, or send a contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our employees up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian sci-fi novel, Zone 23, or Volumes I, II, and III of his Consent Factory Essays, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, feel free to contact him directly.

I think something’s wrong with my Hate Machine.

I’ve got it turned up to 10, but I’m still not feeling it.

The hate. The murderous, self-righteous hate. The mindlessly fanatical hate.

I set the dial to “Palestinians.” Nothing. No reaction whatsoever. So, I set it to “Israelis.” Again, nothing. I just can’t seem to get my hate up. It’s embarrassing. Maybe there are some pills that would help.

Seriously, this is interfering with both my social and professional life. I need to get my hate up somehow. I’ve tried everything I could possibly think of.

I tried reading nothing but news about Israel’s ongoing liquidation of Gaza. I stared at pictures of dead and horribly mutilated Palestinian children. Thousands of them. Killed. Torn to pieces. Residential neighborhoods reduced to rubble. Whole families crushed under tons of concrete.

I told myself, over and over, that they were “terrorists.” Or the children of “terrorists.” Or that they had “voted for terrorists.” Or they were “anti-Semites.” “Human animals.” “The Children of Darkness.”

It didn’t work.

I tried reading nothing but news about the Hamas attack on October 7. The murder of families. The wanton slaughter. I stared at the pictures of the blood-smeared bedrooms. The footage of the executions. I read the messages that people sent to their loved ones before they were shot to death.

I told myself, over and over, that they were “fascists,” “occupiers,” “colonizers,” “Zionazis.” I told myself that they deserved what they got.

Nothing. No arousal whatsoever.

I checked the connections on my Hate Machine. They all seemed fine. So, I tried rebooting it. Twice. Nope. That didn’t work either.

So, finally, I called the Hate Corporation, but I couldn’t get through to a Hate representative, because of “an unusually high volume of callers.”

So, apparently, I’m not the only one with this dysfunction.

That was kind of reassuring. Because, frankly, I’ve been feeling so left out. All the really cool people are grooving on hate. Seriously, check the Internet. It’s like a 24-hour Roman orgy of hate, in which I’m unable to participate, apparently.

I’m sorry for whining. It’s unseemly, I know. And I am fairly sure my inability to achieve and maintain a satisfactory tumescence or protuberance of hate is not my Hate Machine’s fault. I have the latest model, with all the new features.

And other people’s Hate Machines are working just fine.

How is yours doing?

Are you feeling the hate? Are those you hate the embodiment of Evil? They are liars, aren’t they? Liars and murderers. Genociders. Nazis. Subhuman scum. Everything they say is a lie. Everything they do, and are, is wicked. They cannot help it. They were born that way. They need to be wiped off the face of the Earth. They need to be eradicated, don’t they? They are never going to change their ways. Making peace with them is not an option. It’s us or them. They, the others, and all their issue, need to be defeated, vanquished, erased, exterminated.

This is no time for compassion or pity. They, the others, have no morals or ethics, or simple human empathy, so we can’t afford to have any either. None of them are innocent. None of them are civilians. All of them, men, women, and children, are soldiers in the Army of Evil! They’re murderers, so we have to be murderers! They are liars, so we need to become liars! Truth is for children! This is war! We need to kill and kill and kill, and celebrate killing, and swim in their blood, and defile their corpses … the others … our enemies!

Well, what do you know? It appears my Hate Machine is functioning properly after all! Yes, wow, that feels so much better! I guess I just needed to relax, let go, stop thinking so much about what’s right and wrong, and let my hate do what it wants.

Seriously, I’m not kidding, folks … I haven’t had a hate-on like this for years!

I’m ready to join that Roman Orgy of Hatred!

All I need to do now is pick a side.

###

CJ Hopkins
November 21, 2023

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., or its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Substack page, or his Patreon page, or send a contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our employees up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian sci-fi novel, Zone 23, or Volumes I, II, and III of his Consent Factory Essays, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, feel free to contact him directly.

OK, I owe everyone an apology. I get it now. I’ve seen the light. I finally understand the true nature of my thoughtcrimes, and I take responsibility for them, and I stand ready to pay my debt to society.

I have to thank the State of Israel for bringing about this sudden epiphany. How it happened was, Gilad Erdan, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, and his delegation wore yellow Stars of David, i.e., the ones the Nazis forced the Jews to wear in public, at a Security Council session to make a statement. According to The Jerusalem Post, Ambassador Erdan then made remarks comparing the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel to the Holocaust.

“When Jewish babies were burned in Auschwitz, the world was silent, and today Jewish babies were burned in Be’eri and the towns of the South by the Nazi Hamas – and the world is silent again. I will make you remember the shame of your silence every time you look at me,” Arden said. “I will wear the yellow patch until the Nazi Hamas is eliminated and until the Security Council stops being silent and condemns the October 7 massacre. Some of you have learned nothing in the last eighty years! Some of you have forgotten why the United Nations was founded. So I will remind you. From today on, every time you look at me you will remember. When my grandfather and his children were sent to Auschwitz, the world was silent. When his wife and their seven children were sent to the gas chambers, the world was silent. When their bodies were burned alongside millions of other Jewish children, the world was silent,” Erdan said, comparing the silence of the UN about the Hamas massacre on October 7 to the silence of the international community regarding the horrors of the Holocaust.

Now, I’ll be honest, the first thought that went through my head when I read that Jerusalem Post piece was, “Great! Here’s an Israeli diplomat doing exactly what I’m being prosecuted for doing, and no one’s going to prosecute him! All I need to do is bring this to the attention of the Berlin District Court, and they’ll dismiss my case!”

But then I had my epiphany.

Basically, my epiphany was, I realized the two things are completely different, i.e., Israel’s use of a Nazi symbol to make a political statement and me doing the same thing … well, almost the same thing. I’ve never actually relativized or minimized or trivialized or compared anything to the Holocaust, as Gilad Erdan did at the UN. Actually, I’ve advised against doing that. But that doesn’t let me off the hook for my thoughtcrimes! No, I did what I did, and I will have to answer for it in January at the District Court of Berlin!

For readers unfamiliar with my case, what I did was, I tweeted these two Tweets featuring the the cover art of my book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich, which is banned in Germany, and referring to the medical-looking masks that everyone was forced to wear during 2020-2022 as “ideological conformity symbols.”

You can read the background on my case here, or here, or here, or listen to me talk about it here, or here, or here, so I won’t go on about it here.

The important thing is, I understand now how totally wrong (and criminal) it was to do that, and how what I did is completely different from what UN Ambassador Erdan just did!

For starters, it wasn’t just those two Tweets. No, on Twitter, Facebook, and in my essays, and interviews, and, basically, every chance I got, for two years, I compared the rise of the “New Normal” to the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. I noted the similarities between these two forms of totalitarianism: the declaration of a “state of emergency” as a pretext to justify the cancellation of constitutional rights and rule by decree; the propaganda; the censorship; the criminalization of dissent; the mandatory displays of ideological conformity; the invasion of bodily autonomy; the segregation, demonization, and persecution of a scapegoat underclass; and so on … all the classic hallmarks of totalitarian systems.

I understand now how wrong (and criminal) that was.

Watching the Israelis whip out their yellow Stars of David at the Security Council clarified for me when it is and isn’t appropriate to compare things to the Nazis.

Check me, but I think I’ve got it straight now.

When governments and non-governmental entities roll out a “New Normal” on account of a completely fictional “apocalyptic pandemic,” lock people down in their homes for months, terrorize them with official propaganda, force everybody to wear medical-looking masks to display their conformity to the new official “reality” and create the appearance of a deadly plague, outlaw political protests, censor dissent, segregate and demonize anyone refusing to conform to the new official ideology, and otherwise transform societies into pathologized de facto police states, those governments and global non-governmental entities are absolutely nothing like the Nazis.

On the other hand, Hamas, the Islamist political and military organization that governs the Gaza Strip, is definitely exactly like the Nazis … except that there are only around 25,000 of them, and their “Reich” is a tiny stretch of land that has been totally blockaded by Israel for years, and is completely surrounded by an “Israel-Gaza barrier,” and has been under Israeli military occupation since 1967. But, otherwise, Hamas is exactly like the Nazis!

See, the thing I didn’t quite understand when I tweeted my thoughtcrimes in 2022 was that being “exactly like the Nazis” has nothing to do with the actual history of Nazi Germany or totalitarianism per se. I was operating under the assumption that it did. That’s no excuse. I should have known better. Obviously, no one should ever be allowed to compare the rise of Nazism in Germany to any other totalitarian system or movement, no matter how blatantly similar it may be. In fact, the history of the rise of Nazism in Germany is irrelevant to, well, basically everything, unless your discussion is strictly limited to the Holocaust, or if you’re relativizing the Holocaust in defense of Israel’s right to defend itself … in which case, sure, break out those yellow stars and go nuts with the Holocaust comparisons.

Seriously, check my reasoning on this, because I don’t want to get it wrong again and end up facing yet another prosecution. Based on my new post-epiphany understanding, questioning the details of the official account of the October 7 attack is “Holocaust denial.” Hundreds of thousands of people peacefully demonstrating in support of Palestinians is a “hate march.” “Hamas Holocaust denial is dragging us into a new Dark Age.” The October 7 massacre was “barbarism as consequential as the Holocaust,” or at least as barbaric as the Babyn Yar massacre!

How am I doing? Am I good so far? I haven’t relativized the Holocaust, have I?

OK, one more test, just to make sure I’ve got my mind right around this stuff. If I, or anyone, were to compare what the State of Israel is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza to, I don’t know, let’s say, just hypothetically, the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, that would be completely inappropriate, and anti-Semitic, and a hate crime, right? I mean, the IDF isn’t liquidating the strip. They’re defending Israel against Hamas, and are doing their best to protect civilians as they bomb whole neighborhoods into heaps of rubble, wiping out thousands of men, women, and children, entire extended families, who are trapped inside the “Israel-Gaza barrier,” and have nowhere to run or hide from the slaughter.

If anyone were to make that comparison, that would definitely be relativizing the Holocaust, right? That would be like calling for “the extermination of the Jews,” or literally dressing up like Hitler and walking around barking Nazi slogans in public. In fact, anyone comparing the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip to the Warsaw Ghetto, or to any other enclave of any other Nazi-occupied territory, is relativizing, minimizing, and trivializing the Holocaust, and should be fired from their job, blacklisted, and publicly condemned as “a Hamas-loving anti-Semite.”

Help me out. Am I getting the hang of this?

I hope so. All I can do at this point is apologize for leading people astray with all that stuff I wrote about “The New Normal Reich” and “pathologized totalitarianism” during 2020-2022. That, and try to make amends by humiliating myself on social media …

… which seems to be going pretty well so far.

Anyway, I am terribly sorry. No more “Holocaust relativizing” for me! I have seen how it is wrong, and terribly wrong, to compare anything to Nazi Germany, ever. I have learned my lesson. I’m cured! Praise god!

###

CJ Hopkins
November 1, 2023

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., or its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Substack page, or his Patreon page, or send a contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our employees up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian sci-fi novel, Zone 23, or Volumes I, II, and III of his Consent Factory Essays, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, feel free to contact him directly.

Welcome back to the War on Terror. I hope you had a nice 7-year break.

Yes, that’s right, once again, Democracy is under attack by the Axis of Pure Unadulterated Evil! It’s time to switch off your critical faculties, wrap yourself in the American flag, or the Israeli flag, or the Ukrainian flag, or, better yet, all three flags, and stand with the Forces of Freedom and Goodness as they exercise their God-given right to defend the world from the Children of Darkness, and the Putin-Nazis, and Hate, and Rape, and Baby Murderers, and Baby Rapers, and Baby-Raper sympathizers!

For those of us who are old enough to remember 9/11 and its aftermath, it’s déjà vu all over again. Except we already had The War on Terror. So, I don’t know what we’re calling it this time. Maybe it’s The War on Horror, or “Horrific Horror,” as President Biden put it.

Or maybe we should call it The War on Whatever. After all, it’s all the same war.

No. That isn’t going to sell. No one is going to fight a War on Whatever. We need something utterly meaningless but catchy. Something that will shut people’s minds off and keep them from asking inconvenient questions, like a corporate slogan or thought-terminating cliche.

Let’s go with The War on Horror. Here’s how The War on Horror began …

It began on the morning of October 7, when the State of Israel, which was just sitting there, peacefully, in the Middle Eastern territory bestowed on it by God, minding its own business, bothering no one, was unprovokedly attacked by members of Hamas, who, according to the Horrorists, were “exercising their legitimate right to resist occupation” by mass-murdering hundreds of unarmed people at a music event and entire families in their homes. In order to ensure that everyone recognized the legitimacy of their “armed resistance” — or, rather, to guarantee that the Israelis would be forced to massively overreact and that the attack would polarize the global public along the lines Hamas wants people polarized — they went about it with extreme brutality.

Surprise! It worked! Israel is currently transforming Gaza into a heap of smoldering rubble, bombing commercial and residential areas, hospitals, mosques, churches, schools, shelters, people fleeing the air-raids, killing thousands of Palestinians, wiping out entire Palestinian families (or, as Israel calls them, “human shields”), and otherwise exercising its inalienable “right to defend itself” by sealing off Gaza and systematically liquidating its inhabitants, or, rather, by creating “a new security reality.”

And the global public could not be more polarized.

But Hamas can’t take all the credit for that. The most fearsome propaganda machine in the history of fearsome propaganda machines is working overtime, pumping out the message: “You’re either with us or you are with the Horrorists!” “You’re either with us or you are an anti-Semitic, Russia-loving, Baby Raper sympathizer!” And so on. I’m sure you’ve heard the message.

Meanwhile, actual anti-Semites and “revolutionary” fanatics who are totally OK with mass-murdering people as a “resistance” tactic are doing their best to play along. The Internet is swarming with anti-Semites demonizing the Jews for, well, you name it. Crypto-fascists are coming out of the woodwork. Palestinian activists are lionizing Hamas. And so on. I’m sure you’ve seen the coverage.

I’m going to forgo my usual practice of including links to some of that coverage, and to the numerous social media posts documenting the criminalization of dissent and expressions of support for the Palestinians since the War on Horror officially began, because, frankly, right now, I don’t believe anything I see or read until I’ve dedicated time to verifying that it is not propaganda designed to reinforce the official narrative, or the unofficial narrative, or some other narrative.

At the moment, we’re being inundated with narratives, the official narrative, the unofficial narrative, the official unofficial narrative, the alternative official narrative, the alternative unofficial narrative, the bull-goose-loony unofficial narrative, etc., all of which is standard procedure when you are rolling out a War on Horror, or an Apocalyptic Pandemic, or some other major revision to the official master narrative.

Which brings me to that hospital bombing story. You know the one. Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, which Israel bombed, or didn’t bomb, depending on which narrative you believe, or which narrative you don’t really believe but are nonetheless committed to pretending to believe, because believing the other one would betray your “side.”

Now, I want to state this very clearly. I do not know who bombed the hospital.

Yes, of course, I think I know. But I’m here in Berlin. I’m not in Gaza. I’m not in touch with anyone in Gaza. All I have to go on is the word of the IDF, and US Intelligence officials, and statements by the Palestinian authorities, and international media reports, and other stuff anyone can find on the Internet, and … well, you know, common sense.

Call me a “Horrorist sympathizer” if you need to, but I do not take the word of the IDF and anonymous “Intelligence officials” on faith. I examine their narratives critically. I did that during the War on Terror. I did that during Russiagate. I did it during the Covid pandemic. Critically examining official narratives is part of my job as a political satirist.

So, let’s take a look at the official narrative of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital bombing.

According to the official narrative, the Palestinian Horrorists just can’t catch a break. After decades of attacking Israel with their sissy little Horror rockets that typically only kill a few people at best, now, after they finally come up with a new Super-Horror rocket that will kill hundreds of people, the first time they use it, they shoot it into their own hospital.

Or — and this is “Official Narrative B” — they shoot their new Super-Duper Horror rocket at Israel, but it disintegrates in mid-air, or is intercepted by the Israeli “Dome” thing, and one fragment of it (i.e., the Super-Horror rocket) lands in the parking lot of the hospital, and it turns out that fragment just happened to be the “Super-Horror” component of the rocket, which simultaneously ignites the topped-up gas tanks of every single car in the parking lot, which generates a massive fireball that blows the people in the parking lot to bits.

But that’s just the current version of the official narrative, which has evolved over time.

First, shortly after the explosion, Benjamin Netanyahu’s social media advisor took to X to celebrate the strike, crowing “The Israeli Air Force struck a Hamas terrorist base inside a hospital in Gaza!” This Tweet was quickly deleted, of course, and the IDF officially denied responsibility, blamed the explosion on an Islamic Jihad rocket, and posted CCTV footage confirming their story. Unfortunately for the IDF, the fake footage they posted included a timestamp of 7:59, one hour after the event. So, the IDF deleted that Tweet, revised it, and reposted it without the fake footage. Then other IDF-related entities posted other footage, which was also fake.

Al Jazeera has documented all that here …

The next morning, footage of the hospital parking lot where the explosion occurred and the hospital building still standing was all the official propagandists needed to put the finishing touches on their official narrative, but, just for good measure, the IDF posted a “surveillance recording of two Hamas terrorists” with funny accents confessing that they had accidentally bombed the hospital. It was kind of like a Cheech and Chong routine. Seriously, they had the audacity to do that.

Intelligence-agency sock puppets immediately inundated the Internet with tweets and posts reinforcing the “misfired rocket” story. Anyone questioning it was shouted down as an “anti-Semitic terrorist-loving idiot.” Papers of record revised their headlines. Biden confirmed that the “other team” did it. The corporate media, assorted Persons of Influence, and even prominent independent media sources like Racket News and Public declared the case closed. After all, the IDF and anonymous US Intelligence officials would never lie to us or attempt to dupe the public with fabricated “evidence,” and anyone who suggests they would is an “anti-Semitic, Horrorist-loving, hate-speech-disseminating disinformationist!”

Apparently, the UK’s Channel 4 News did not get the memo. Here’s their coverage …

Neither did the Aaron Maté at The Grayzone …

But, I don’t know … maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the Israeli military, and the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Censorship Industrial Complex, and the US Intelligence community and its cutouts, are telling us the truth this time.

Unfortunately, we’ll probably never know, because conducting an independent investigation into the bombing would be “inappropriate” …

Seriously, though, this is only the beginning. The torrent of official and unofficial propaganda, gaslighting, and emotional manipulation is only going to increase over time. Probably the best thing to do at this point is pick a “side” and back it unquestioningly, no matter what it does or says. If you’re a professional person, with a career, and a mortgage, and kids, or aspiring to be such a person, I would recommend going with The Powers That Be. It’s easy to do that. Simply unsubscribe from, and block, and otherwise close your ears and mind to “conspiracy theorists” like me. Stick with those anonymous “Intelligence officials,” the IDF, and the corporate media, and those “fact-checking” entities, and Google, and the rest of the Official Reality Enforcement Apparatus that has been rolled out, globally, during the past three years. You didn’t think they were rolling all that out for kicks, did you? No … of course you didn’t.

In any event, welcome to the War on Horror, or Terror, or Reality, or Whatever!

###

CJ Hopkins
October 22, 2023

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., or its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Substack page, or his Patreon page, or send a contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our employees up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian sci-fi novel, Zone 23, or Volumes I, II, and III of his Consent Factory Essays, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, feel free to contact him directly.

Here’s a story destined for urgent dispatch down the Memory Hole. In fact, if you listen closely, you can already hear it being sucked down through the ducts of the GloboCap Ministry of Truth toward the enormous mnemonic incinerator where all official “unstories” go to die. Yesterday, it was an embarrassment. Tomorrow, it will no longer be of interest. By next week, it will have never happened.

So, let’s review it before that happens … and perhaps try to understand why it happened.

What happened was, on the eve of Yom Kippur, members of the Canadian House of Commons and assorted invited dignitaries and diplomats stood up in the Canadian parliament and paid extensive homage to a Nazi. Not a figurative Nazi. A literal Nazi. A member of the Waffen SS.

They did this shamelessly, exuberantly, on camera, in front of the entire world.

The Nazi in question is Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old Ukrainian Nazi who emigrated to Canada in the 1950s following his military career as a Nazi in the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen SS, the combat branch of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary forces, whose members swore allegiance to Adolf Hitler.

Here’s Yaroslav (front row center) in what he describes as “the happiest days of his life” …

The 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (also known as SS Galizien) was created by the Nazis in 1943. It was comprised of soldiers from the Galicia region who were trained and armed by German SS officers, and is believed to be responsible for war crimes like the Huta Pieniacka massacre in 1944, among other war crimes, mass murders, and so on.

Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine, and the members of the Canadian parliament and other dignitaries in the House of Commons thanked Yaroslav “for all his service.” They rose to their feet, beaming up at Yaroslav with gratitude and adoration, and clapped like a bunch of trained Nazi seals.

For those who know their post-WWII history, this repulsive Nazi-celebrating spectacle was not as completely shocking as it might sound. As Max Blumenthal reported in the Grayzone, “by celebrating a Waffen-SS volunteer as a hero, Canada’s Liberal Party highlighted a longstanding policy that has seen Ottawa train fascist militants in Ukraine while welcoming in thousands of post-war Nazi SS veterans.” Chrystia Freeland, Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, just happens to be the granddaughter of a Ukrainian Nazi propagandist. And there are monuments to the Nazis all over Canada. And so on.

Anyway, someone drew attention to Yaroslav Hunka’s Nazi history, and the shit hit the fan on social media. The stink soon spread to the corporate and state media, which had no choice but to get on the bandwagon. They couldn’t get away with ignoring the story, so they were forced to report it, and spin it as a “blunder.”

Yes, it appears, once again, that “mistakes were made.”

The speaker of the House fell on his sword and resigned. Trudeau called the episode “deeply embarrassing,” and implied that the Russians had somehow tricked him and his cronies into cheering for a literal Nazi with their devious “Russian disinformation” operations.

Then, in a particularly Orwellian move, members of the House of Commons tried to erase the whole affair from the official record, so that, once the video had been visibility-filtered into Internet oblivion, there would be no proof that it had ever really happened. But they were too late. The Nazi cat was out of the bag.

Apologies, “fact checks,” and rationalizations ensued.

Dignitary after dignitary explained to the press how they had no idea who was fighting who in the Second World War, and had just assumed that the Nazis were the Russians … or something.

German historians goose-stepped onto Twitter to explain how the question of who exactly was and wasn’t technically a “Nazi” was … well, you know, complicated.

Oh, yeah, and speaking of the Germans, as it turns out, the German ambassador to Canada was among the crowd of dignitaries enthusiastically honoring a Nazi. Of course, the German public won’t be aware of that, as the German media will not report it, and RT, which did, is banned in Germany.

So it goes in the New Normal Reich … and, no, I’m not just referring to Germany. Yes, I have a bone to pick with the German authorities, as they are prosecuting me for comparing what I’ve been calling the “New Normal Reich” to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. However, as I’ve made abundantly clear in my book and my columns and interviews, the “New Normal Reich” does not refer specifically to Germany — or to Canada, or to any other single country — but, rather, to a decentralized network of governments, global corporations, banks, think tanks, media conglomerates, global health authorities, non-governmental governing entities, and other unaccountable persons and entities that establish and enforce the official ideological “reality” that we currently live in … which, call it what you want, but it’s global capitalism.

This supranational network of power (which is a system, not a conspiracy of individuals, and which I often refer to as “GloboCap,” much as it irritates some of my conservative readers) is going totalitarian on us. It has been happening, gradually, since the 1990s. I’ve been warning about this development for several years now. It has taken a while, but more and more of my colleagues are starting to see the big picture. Some of them are starting to use the “T-word.” Which is good. We need to call things what they are.

And we need to not call things what they aren’t.

Fiascos like the one in Canada are almost irresistibly tempting to political satirists like myself. How easy it would be to call Trudeau and Freeland and the German ambassador “Nazis.” After all, they stood up and applauded a Nazi. And they are arming, funding, and celebrating actual neo-Nazis in the war in Ukraine.

Nevertheless, these folks are not Nazis. They are functionaries of GloboCap. GloboCap is not a Nazi outfit. Nazism is an ideology. And GloboCap has no ideology. It has no values whatsoever. All it cares about is markets, and profits, and maintaining and expanding its power. Thus, it is free to instrumentalize any and all forces that advance its aims … neo-Nazis, Islamic militants, environmentalists, anti-fascists, neo-nationalists, anti-neo-nationalists, or whoever. GloboCap could not care less.

This is why GloboCap factotums like Trudeau can denounce the Canadian truckers as fascists, and persecute them, and run them down with horses, one day, and then slobber over a literal Nazi the next. It’s why American liberals who spent four years shrieking about “the return of fascism” during the Donald Trump administration can turn on a dime and support Ukrainian neo-Nazis the moment the talking heads on the television tell them to … like the Outer Party members in 1984 when the Party switches official enemies.

It has nothing to do with Nazism, or Communism, or “cultural Marxism,” or any other Ism. It has nothing to do with ideology, or beliefs, or any social or cultural values whatsoever.

The New Normal Reich is not the return of the Third Reich. Everything would be easier, or at least clearer, if it were. The New Normal Reich is a global-capitalist Reich. It is a new form of totalitarianism, not the resurrection of a 20th-Century form of it. Yes, I am repeating myself. And I am going to keep on repeating myself on the off chance that, if I repeat myself enough, someone with a much bigger megaphone than mine, or who isn’t as visibility-filtered as I am these days, might want to take a break from The Outrage of the Week and try to understand what is actually happening, and why it’s happening, and why it is happening now, and share that understanding with the public.

I would be happy to discuss and debate that with anyone in possession of such a megaphone, preferably at some point before GloboCap declares the next “Global State of Emergency” and starts rounding up the “conspiracy theorists” and “disinformationists,” and the “deniers” of whatever, and the next round of “mistakes” gets made.

In the meantime, I’ll sign off and let folks get back to what’s left of The GloboCap Nazi Follies, and Elon’s trip to the Mexican border, or what’s his face pulling the fire alarm in Congress, or the Russell Brand thing, or the burning issue of whether Roger Waters is an anti-Semite …

… or whatever GloboCap has in store for us next week!

###

CJ Hopkins
October 1, 2023

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., or its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Substack page, or his Patreon page, or send a contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our employees up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian sci-fi novel, Zone 23, or Volumes I, II, and III of his Consent Factory Essays, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, feel free to contact him directly.

So, I’ve been excommunicated from Michael Shellenberger’s global anti-censorship movement. It’s my own fault. I was sowing dissension. I engaged in harmful speech in the group chat. I was making people feel uncomfortable. I was not playing ball. I was not with the program.

The program, as you may recall, was launched in Westminster, London, in June, when Mike and Matt Taibbi and Russell Brand exposed the Censorship Industrial Complex …

… for 35 pounds sterling a head.

My readers may recall this piece I published about the secret gathering of journalists, authors, artists, academics, and activists that took place after that public event. I couldn’t say too much about it at the time, as we were operating under strict OPSEC protocols, and had taken oaths of silence, and so on, which, being excommunicated, I am no longer bound by. I’m still going to be a little cagey, however, as there are a lot of people involved in Mike’s movement who I like and respect, and I don’t want to harm them with my dissension-sowing any more than necessary.

Also, before I make fun of Mike, and share my somewhat more serious thoughts about how not to launch “a free-speech movement,” I want to make it clear that I still support this campaign, and any other anti-censorship campaign, regardless of how flawed or supercilious it may be.

All right, let’s get down to it, shall we?

Mike’s movement is preparing to publish a declaration. It’s a good declaration. I contributed to it. I signed it, although my name will not appear on it now, as Mike has threatened to remove it if I published a piece like this. Mike is an extremely smart guy, but he doesn’t seem to get that I don’t respond well to threats … or, rather, that this is how I respond to threats. Or, who knows? Maybe he actually wanted me to publish this piece, and goaded me into it, which, I can see how that could be a shrewd PR move.

In any event, it’s a good declaration (or it was the last time I had access to it). There is nothing wrong with the declaration. What has taken up most of the last three months of the coalition’s time and energy, and has led to my excommunication, is the hunt for Very Important Persons to be included as signatories when the declaration is released.

Apparently, the way it works with such declarations and “open letters,” and so on, is that you write up your declaration or letter and then you try to get selected big shots to sign it in order to make it look more impressive to … well, whoever you’re trying to impress. The character of your big-shot signatories is critical, because the media, and “the court of public opinion,” and your potential major philanthropic backers, are going to judge you by the company you keep.

Mike’s anti-censorship coalition has been carrying out this process by “consensus,” under the watchful eye and firm hand of Mike. Mike is not the “leader” of this coalition, which is totally leaderless and democratic, of course. He is just the “facilitator,” who explains the objectives, makes the final decisions, polices people’s speech, and excommunicates suppressive persons whose dissension-sowing threatens to disrupt the “atmosphere of mutual respect” that Mike feels he needs to “maintain” in the group chat.

Yes, Mike has a little control-freak problem. Many non-leader leaders of “movements” do. If you’ve ever been involved in political activism, you know what I mean. If you haven’t, count your blessings.

Anyway, the Hunt for VIP Signatories has been awkward, due to (a) the need to maintain the appearance of “decision-by-consensus” in the coalition’s totally non-hierarchical group chat, (b) concern among various coalition members about including “divisive” VIPs, and (c) Mike’s behind-the-scenes machinations.

For example, at one point, I offered to contact one of the only VIPs I know to ask him for help with further VIP outreach. Mike jumped into the chat and quashed that idea, as I had made it clear that I was not willing to try to dictate to this Very Important Person who he should and shouldn’t reach out to for us. Days or weeks later — I can’t remember exactly — one of Mike’s employees wrote to me sub rosa and gave me the secret go-ahead from Mike. So, I reached out to this VIP, who then reached out to some other VIPs, many of whom were happy to sign, and some of whom offered to help with further outreach.

Panic broke out at Coalition HQ. Some of the Very Important Persons that my Very Important Person had invited were potentially Divisive Persons, who hadn’t been vetted by consensus on the coalition’s VIP-vetting spreadsheet. (I kid you not, there’s an actual spreadsheet.) So, I was asked to reach out to my VIP and instruct him to cease and desist with further outreach before he reached out to further Divisive Persons, who might reach out to further Divisive Persons, at which point, everything might spin out of control! Needless to say, I declined to do that.

If you’re wondering about exactly who qualifies as a “Divisive Person” in the coalition … well, certainly not Very Important Persons like Richard Dawkins, who in 2021 compared folks who “refused” the Covid “vaccines” to “faith-heads releasing rattlesnakes in supermarkets”…

But later admitted that “mistakes may have been made” …

Or fanatical New Normalist Slavoj Žižek …

You can watch Slavoj getting extremely worked up in support of Covid “vaccine” mandates, and mocking people who care about “silly” things like their personal bodily autonomy, with Briahna Joy Gray in 2021, if you think you have the stomach for it …

VIPs like Dawkins and Žižek are not “divisive.” They are very important A-list persons who are committed to universal human rights, and freedom of speech, and all that kind of stuff, unless, of course, the authorities announce that they need to go full-blown totalitarian and lock down and segregate and censor everyone because of a virus with a 99.8% survival rate, in which case, you know, “Sieg fucking Heil!”

Russell Brand, however, is definitely “divisive.” You remember Russell Brand from that poster above advertising the big event in London, don’t you? Here’s our friend Russell Brand today …

The Russell-Brand-cancellation op was what sealed my fate with Mike’s free speech movement. I had been holding my nose for quite a while — for example, I never opposed having people like Dawkins and Žižek on the signatories list, as I understood the PR logic — and I was praying that none of the coalition members would bring up “the revelations” (as one of them put it), but the odds of that not happening were poor. Sure enough, someone brought Brand up, and someone checked, and he had been asked to sign on, but as of Saturday he hadn’t responded, at least not according to the VIP-vetting spreadsheet. So that was obviously a huge relief. However, what if he responded now (i.e., post-“revelations”) and wanted to sign? Should he still be allowed to? A “risk assessment” was suggested.

And, OK, I got a little snarky and proposed that we skip the “risk assessment” and all the other PR-strategizing bullshit and just uphold the principles we are claiming to defend.

Whereupon Mike Shellenberger needed to reach me, urgently, presumably to shout at me and threaten me again. I’d had an earlier such phone call from Mike, when I criticized his sucking up to Elon Musk and suggested that it made us look not quite neutral. Mike called me at home, apoplectic, that time, and threatened to kick me out of the club if I didn’t toe the line, which I found sort of funny, and a bit disturbing, but nothing I couldn’t handle. I have known a lot of control freaks in my day. And Mike has done, and is still doing, a lot of great work. And we all have our character flaws, don’t we?

Anyway, I wasn’t in the mood for another screaming, threatening conversation with Mike, as I was still at my friend’s converted monastery in Italy, and I finally had a peaceful day to myself. (The Italian workmen who are jackhammering big holes in the monastery walls don’t work on the weekends.) I decided I would call him back later.

Next thing I knew, I was excommunicated.

I’m not a professional movement builder, but I’m pretty sure this is not how you do it. I don’t mean my excommunication. I mean the suffocating top-down micromanagement, and the PR-strategizing, and the VIP-idolatry, and the paranoia about alienating mainstream people who are going to be alienated anyway, regardless of how many Hollywood celebrities and Harvard professors you dangle in their faces. The simple fact is, playing by the rules of the system and the “reality” you claim to be opposing a recipe for failure. Or, worse than failure, a diversion, the simulation of success. Which is where I’m afraid Mike’s “movement” is headed.

Movements are not PR campaigns. Yes, of course, some PR is involved, but the masses are not your employees. And they aren’t CGI extras in your narcissistic movie. They are actual living, breathing people, people who do not need us to lead them. Basically, the masses don’t give a shit what Richard Dawkins and Slavoj Žižek endorse. The editors of “respected” publications like The New Yorker and The New York Times give a shit, but the masses don’t give a shit about them. If you are going to “build a movement” to oppose the Censorship Industrial Complex (which Mike claims he wants to do), at some point, you’re going to have to alienate some of your friends and colleagues in NormalWorld and get your hands dirty and connect with the masses, or the “people that no one has ever heard of,” as Mike calls them.

The people that no one has ever heard of are not stupid. They know the difference between a serious anti-censorship campaign and a vanity project. There’s still time for Mike to turn this thing around, let go of the reins, stop sucking up to the mainstream establishment, and reach out to the masses. Honestly, I hope he will. I wish him and the London gang success. There are millions of people out there who would get on board with a grassroots campaign opposing the Censorship Industrial Complex, but, to get them on board, you have to let go of the wheel and let them steer the ship.

The irony is, when you’re “building a movement,” when you know you are succeeding is when you lose control of it, when the movement doesn’t need you to “lead” it, when it starts moving in directions you never imagined and starts doing things you never intended. But you can’t get there if you suffocate it in its infancy, if you are so obsessed with maintaining control that you snuff out every idea and impulse that doesn’t conform to your vision of it.

Mike means well. He’s got a good heart. And he’s a fighter. All of which I respect. I hope he can learn that lesson, quickly. Perhaps the thing he has set in motion will teach it to him as things progress. We could certainly do with an actual global grassroots anti-censorship movement. I hope Mike and the gang can unclench their anal sphincters a bit and help get us there.

Oh, and regarding Russell Brand. I don’t know Russell Brand. I have absolutely no idea what he has or hasn’t done. Neither do you, probably. Which is not the point. The point is the current global-capitalist crackdown on dissent, which is in full-swing. Russell Brand is just the latest head on a spike, alongside the heads of Assange, Snowden, Trump, Corbyn, Carlson, et al. They are greasing up a spike for Bobby Kennedy’s head, and the head of anyone else who challenges them, even people that no one has ever heard of, like me.

I think Max Blumenthal made the point succinctly …

… but, you know, Max is a Russian-sponsored, Covid-denying, conspiracy-theorizing, Trump-loving, transphobic, anti-Semitic Jew, who raped his neighbor’s hamster … or whatever. But then, who among us isn’t, these days?

###

CJ Hopkins
September 20, 2023

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., or its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Substack page, or his Patreon page, or send a contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our employees up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian sci-fi novel, Zone 23, or Volumes I, II, and III of his Consent Factory Essays, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, feel free to contact him directly.

So, the Berlin State Prosecutor has launched another criminal investigation of me. Apparently, I’m being charged with reporting on the original investigation of me that the Berlin State Prosecutor launched in June.

What happened is, the prosecutor visited my blog and read a column I published in July, The Criminalization of Dissent (Revisited), which included screenshots of the alleged “hate-crime” Tweets that the original criminal investigation is based on, and that resulted in the Order of Punishment that the Berlin District Court handed down two weeks ago. So, the prosecutor opened a new criminal investigation and sent my attorney an official notice explaining the gravity of the additional charges.

The charges are of the utmost gravity. I am officially accused of “relativizing” or “minimizing” the crimes of the Nazis … by republishing the two Tweets that I originally tweeted.

Here, once again, are the Tweets …

Yes, that’s right, I just published them again. I am going to explain why I published them again.

I’m not going to explain the Tweets again. I have explained them in several previous columns. I have explained them to Matt Taibbi of Racket News, Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone, James Freeman, Patrick Henningsen, Elena Louisa Lange, Dirk Pohlmann, and Christine Black at Brownstone Institute (forgive me if I’m forgetting anyone). I explained them to Stefan Millius of Weltwoche, and to another journalist at a big Swiss newspaper. My attorney has explained them, in German, to the prosecutor, and to German audiences on Kontrafunk. RT published a piece explaining them. I believe they have been exhaustively explained.

Not that they ever really needed explanation. You would have to be a certified moron to believe they “minimized,” or “relativized,” or in any way made light of the crimes of the Nazis. You and I are not certified morons. Neither is the Berlin State Prosecutor. Neither is the District Court of Berlin. Not to put too fine a point on it, the charges are horseshit, and everyone involved knows it. They are a blatant pretext to crackdown on dissent.

OK, now let me explain why I just published the Tweets again, knowing full well that the Berlin State Prosecutor is probably going to read this column, become extremely agitated, and charge me with additional “hate crimes.”

No, I am not a glutton for punishment. I’m not at all enjoying my introduction to the so-called “German legal system.” It is taking up my time. It is making me angry. It is upsetting my wife, which I do not appreciate. It is costing me a lot of money. It has forced me to ask other people for money, which is something I do not like to do. It’s screwing with my sleep. It is distracting me from my work. And so on. Which is exactly the point.

The goal of horseshit prosecutions like mine (and those of many other dissidents currently) is (a) to punish us for speaking out against “New Normal” totalitarianism by making our lives as miserable as possible, (b) to make examples of us to discourage others from speaking out, and (c) to intimidate us into shutting the fuck up.

Totalitarians, fascists, and other power freaks are essentially just glorified schoolyard bullies. They may cloak themselves in the mantle of the law, but their modus operandi is brute force. Beneath all the bullshit, their message is simple: “either do what we say, or we will hurt you.”

OK, prepare yourself, because I’m going to give you some advice. I do not generally like to do that, but, in this case, I’m going to make an exception.

Never, ever, give in to a bully. The second you do, that bully owns you. What the bully wants, more than whatever he is demanding, more than anything else in the world, is your fear. The bully interprets your fear as respect, because the bully doesn’t understand respect. The bully craves your fear, and your obedience, because they reify the bully’s “authority.” They enable the bully to feel powerful and important. The bully needs to feel “powerful” and “important” because the bully feels weak and unimportant, and afraid. All fascists are essentially cowards. They are cowards, and nihilists, who hate themselves, and fear themselves, and hate and fear life, which is why they are so obsessed with controlling everything.

The point is, never give in to a bully. Never reify a bully’s “authority.” If you do, you will find yourself sucked into the bully’s sadistic, nihilistic “reality.” You will be playing by the bully’s rules. And that is all “reality” actually is, a set of rules we agree to play by, or, in this case, do not agree to play by.

So, getting back to my criminal case, and the Berlin State Prosecutor’s latest attempt to bully me into shutting up and demonstrating my “respect” for the “authority” and “power” of the Berlin State Prosecutor, fuck that. I do not respond well to threats. I do not take orders from totalitarians and fascists, or any other type of authoritarians or bullies. So that is why I have republished those Tweets, and why I will continue to republish those Tweets every time the German authorities threaten me with additional criminal charges for refusing to obey their “authority.”

Again, I am under no illusions. I expect the prosecutor to file new charges and issue further threats, which I will defy, which will lead to additional charges, and so on. I am not looking forward to that, but I don’t have any other choice, not if I want to be able to respect myself.

If you have any doubts about whether that will happen (i.e., an endless cycle of new bullshit criminal charges stemming from my repeated refusal to respond to the German authorities’ bullying), well, let me tell you about another dissident the German authorities are currently persecuting. I’ll do it quickly, and then I’ll let you go.

As many of my readers are aware, I am presently holed up in an undisclosed location in the Italian countryside. Michael Ballweg, the founder and lead organizer of the “Querdenken” movement, was also here for a while. Michael, who is an excellent cook, whipped up some delicious “extremist” dinners, after which we all sat around “denying Covid,” “conspiracy theorizing,” brainwashing each other with “Russian propaganda,” and “delegitimizing the state,” and so on. Late at night, when the other “extremists” were sleeping, Michael and I discussed our criminal cases.

Michael’s case is a bit more serious than mine. Michael just spent nine months in jail. The German authorities have seized his assets, and frozen all his funds, so he is homeless, and bankrupt, and they are prosecuting him for attempted fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion, or, in other words, for launching a protest movement. If you’re not familiar with Michael and Querdenken, you can read the official propaganda disseminated by the usual “mainstream” media or the Intelligence officers who edit Wikipedia, or … here’s a Spiked article to start you off. Then, go ahead, do your own research.

The most absurd aspect of Michael’s case is the German authorities’ “theory of his crimes.” According to this theory, Michael’s devious scheme was to commit serious fraud by … well, basically, launching a nationwide protest movement that was certain to get a ton of media attention and incur the wrath of the German authorities. As any criminal mastermind will confirm, the best way to commit major fraud is to absolutely infuriate the government by organizing a series of massive protests, and generate tons of media attention, because you definitely want as much publicity as possible while you are defrauding your unsuspecting supporters of their voluntary donations to your cause.

Seriously, this is their “theory of the crime,” which would make Michael Ballweg the most idiotic and incompetent fraudster in the history of fraud.

I could go on about his case, and mine, or those of the numerous other dissidents that are currently being made examples of, and about the broader GloboCap crackdown on dissent, which is happening, not just in New Normal Germany, but all throughout the New Normal Reich, but I need to end here and go water some plants. I am serving as “caretaker” of this thoughtcriminal sanctuary, and I take my responsibilities seriously.

I’ll keep you (and the Berlin State Prosecutor) posted on my further “hate crimes.” In the meantime, best wishes from somewhere in Italy!

###

CJ Hopkins
September 10, 2023

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., or its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Substack page, or his Patreon page, or send a contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our employees up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian sci-fi novel, Zone 23, or Volumes I, II, and III of his Consent Factory Essays, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, feel free to contact him directly.

So, the Germans are putting me on trial for my thoughtcrimes, and, apparently, I’ve already been found guilty and sentenced. Bear with me and I’ll try to explain.

The Berlin District Court has issued a so-called “penalty order” or “order of punishment,” in which I am advised that I am now officially a criminal in Germany, for tweeting two Tweets. According to my attorney, a trial will now be scheduled, at which my attorney will argue the case before the judge that just issued the “order of punishment.” At this trial, the judge will listen attentively to the arguments my attorney has already made in writing, consider them carefully, and find me guilty, again. Then the judge will reaffirm the “order of punishment.”

Go ahead, read that paragraph again.

After my Kafkaesque trial has concluded, my attorney will file a series of appeals, which will fail, at which point I will have to decide whether to pay a fine of 3,600 Euros or go to German prison for 60 days.

This process will take months, if not years, and will cost me God knows how much money in attorney’s fees, court costs, and then the €3,600 fine. Yes, I’m going to pay the fine. I am not going to German prison for 60 days. Life is too short, and I am getting older, and it wouldn’t really accomplish anything except making a narcissistic spectacle of myself.

However, what will accomplish something (I don’t know how much, but something) is if I see the whole process through to the end, and shine as much light on it as I possibly can, because my case is just one of many such cases, and the real story here is not about me, it is about the crackdown on political dissent that is being carried out, not just here in Germany, but also in other countries all throughout the West.

There are not many outlets reporting this story, not outlets with any significant reach. If you are reading this column, you’re probably aware of various alternative media outlets that are, but most of these outlets are quarantined off where “normal” people never have to see them, and are delegitimized as “unreliable sources” and purveyors of “misinformation,” and so on.

There are a few bigger sources covering the story, which are also increasingly being branded “illegitimate,” Matt Taibbi’s Racket News, Michael Shellenberger’s Public, Glenn Greenwald’s Locals operations, and I’m sure I’m forgetting a few more, forgive me.

The point is, unless you’re a charter member of the “science-denying, conspiracy-theorizing, hate-speech-speaking, anti-vaxxing, misinforming left-or-right extremist” club — i.e., people who read weird “malinformationist” publications like The Grayzone, OffGuardian, ZeroHedge, Dissident Voice, and Unlimited Hangout, and who are planning to vote for Bobby Kennedy, or, God help them, Donald Trump — you probably have no idea what I mean when I refer to “the crackdown on dissent” … or you do, and you think it’s just hunky-dory.

I won’t mince words. The folks who think it’s hunky-dory are totalitarians. They’re fascists. They applaud the crackdown on dissent. They applaud the criminalization of dissent. They applaud the censorship of political speech, of any speech they do not agree with. They want their political opponents in prison. They want everyone who disagrees with them punished. They want people who offend them cancelled. They want anyone who refuses to conform to their official ideology erased.

I have been calling these people “totalitarians” and “fascists” for a number of years now. I do not enjoy doing that. I’m not doing it gratuitously. Some of these people were my friends. I’m doing that, calling these people “fascists,” and comparing the nascent totalitarianism that is erupting all throughout the West to other, earlier totalitarian systems, like Stalinism (sorry, Marxist friends), and, yes, to fucking Nazi Germany, because, despite the fact that there are numerous differences, a lot of it is textbook totalitarianism. Naked textbook totalitarianism. There isn’t another, nicer word for it … or for those who are enthusiastically embracing it.

I’m not going to present the evidence for that assertion again. I have done that ad nauseam, much of it in my latest book, which is banned by Amazon in several countries, and which bears a warning on other Amazon sites to “visit the WHO, the CDC,” or your local national health authority, “for the latest information on Covid-19 and vaccines” before you consider buying it, and the cover art of which is about to make me an official “hate criminal,” with a criminal record.

That’s right, as I explained at greater length in a previous column, the pretext for this so-called “hate crime” prosecution is two Tweets I tweeted almost exactly one year ago of the cover art of that very same book, which just happens to document the rollout of the “New Normal” (i.e., the new totalitarianism) in 2020 and 2021.

Here are the two Tweets that constitute my “hate crimes.”

The one on the left reads, “The masks are ideological-conformity symbols. That is all they are. That is all they have ever been. Stop acting like they have ever been anything else, or get used to wearing them.” The one on the right is a quote by Karl Lauterbach, the Minister of Health of Germany. It reads “The masks always send out a signal.” The image is the cover art of my book.

Say what you want about me and my writing. I can be “provocative,” and some of my political satire is bombastically over-the-top, but, as Matt Taibbi put it in a recent Racket News piece …

“No amount of drugs exist that if consumed would allow a rational person to conclude that the writing of C.J. Hopkins furthers ‘the aims of a former National Socialist Organization.’ Agree with him or not, and I increasingly do, he used his imagery to compare the sweeping declarations of emergency power that were common around the world during the pandemic (and were particularly authoritarian in Germany) to Nazi tactics.”

And that is what I am being accused of, and “punished” for doing, by the German authorities, i.e., “furthering the aims of a National Socialist Organization” … basically, promoting Nazism, for tweeting those two Tweets above.

There is no complex legal issue here. Yes, swastikas are banned in Germany if you’re a Nazi or promoting Nazism or Fascism, but they are permitted for the purposes of “civic education, countering anti-constitutional activities, art, science, research and education, coverage of historic and current events,” and similar purposes, according to German law. Do you seriously believe that the German hate-crime police and the prosecutor and the judge do not understand that? Of course they understand that. They’re not complete imbeciles. They know the charges are just a pretext. And they know we know the charges are just a pretext. They do not care. They do not have to. They don’t even have to pretend to be following the rule of law. Not anymore. Because they know the majority of the masses are with them.

The point of prosecutions like this (and much more serious and significant prosecutions, like that of Julian Assange, for example) is to send a message. The naked disregard for the rule of law, the blatant absurdity of the charges, the open contempt for democratic principles, is all part of the message. It’s not a message about the law. It’s a message about power. Who has it, and who doesn’t. And what happens to those who refuse to bow down to it.

The message is not intended for me, or for more important figures like Julian Assange, or the many other less well-known dissidents that are being made examples of currently. We’re just the medium that conveys the message. We’re the delivery service. The message is for you.

I’m pretty sure you’re getting the message. The question is … how are you going to respond?

I do not mean by “storming” your capitol. Please do not go out and get yourself shot. I mean, are you going to help shine a light on where we are headed? Because it’s pretty fucking dark. Folks are offering to send me money to help with my legal costs, and I’m extremely grateful, because I’m going to need it (and here’s how to do that), but what I think we need to do is a little harder, and costs more, and is much more important.

We need to talk to the totalitarians … yes, the ones who wanted to put us in camps. If we can’t get through to them, we’re probably screwed. And there is a window of opportunity to do that now. It’s not 2020 or 2021. The mass hysteria has worn off for a lot of people. I know, not all of them, but for some of them, a lot of them. Some of them are finally reachable.

Take a chance, talk to them, the ones you know, or used to know. Try to get through to them. Not the bug-eyed, fanatical, foaming-at-the-mouth types who can’t wait for the return of the “emergency measures.” The other ones … you know the ones I mean. The ones who want out. You can see it in their eyes. Take a chance. Talk to these people. Totalitarianism, fascism, it is not an identity. It’s a mindset. No one is born a fascist. People can be deprogrammed. Some of them can. And, at this point, we need all the help we can get.

So, if you’re one of the kind and generous folks who have been asking what you can do to help and offering to send me money, sure, go ahead and send me the money — thank you, I’ve been overwhelmed by your messages, and I’m sorry that I can’t personally respond to all of them — but also consider what I’m suggesting, if you can possibly bring yourself to do it. If you can’t, I completely understand. Trust me, I am still just as angry as you are. I am hurt. I feel betrayed and abandoned. I have a feeling that some of you feel that way too. So I know what I’m asking when I ask you to talk to the New Normal totalitarians, the ones who might be reachable.

If you can’t yet, don’t. But if you’re able to, try.

Don’t try to convince them that you were right and they were wrong. Just shine a light on the road we’re on. Try to get them to recognize where we’re headed. Regardless of who was right and who was wrong about whatever, we are all going down this road together.

Personally, I’d rather not ride it all the way to the end and face what is down there this time.

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CJ Hopkins
August 24, 2023

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., or its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Substack page, or his Patreon page, or send a contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our employees up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian sci-fi novel, Zone 23, or Volumes I, II, and III of his Consent Factory Essays, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, feel free to contact him directly.