C.J. Hopkins's Blog, page 6

It’s never a very enjoyable experience, facing the fact that you’ve been bamboozled. Realizing that you’ve fallen prey to an elaborate con, or PYSOP, is painful. It’s embarrassing. People feel ashamed. No one likes to see themselves as a sucker. It’s humiliating. It makes people angry. It makes them want to lash out at someone.

The funny thing is, it usually isn’t the person who conned them that they want to lash out at. Doing that would only make them feel more ashamed. No, typically, who people want to lash out at, when they finally realize that they’ve been bamboozled, are the people who didn’t get bamboozled along with them, and who tried to warn them that they were being bamboozled.

This phenomenon is occurring right now. I know this, because a certain sector of my readers are angrily unsubscribing from my Substack, and unfollowing me on Twitter, and so on. This happens more or less every time that people start to realize I was right about some PSYOP or con that I warned them about … Russiagate, Covid, and now “free-speech Twitter,” or “X,” or whatever we’re calling it today.

Yes, that’s right, the jig is up. The bloom is off the rose. The cat is out of the bag. The party is over. The thrill is gone. Folks are finally starting to realize that “free-speech Twitter” was an elaborate con (or a PSYOP, depending on how paranoid you are), and they’re none too happy about this realization.

So, they’re taking it out on blasphemers like me who tried to warn them about The Emperor Elonicus, and how the Twitter Files was a textbook limited hangout, and who pointed out how Musk shut it down as soon as it had served its purpose, and who referred to some of them as “Musk cultists,” and “suckers,” and who tweeted sarcastic Tweets like this …

But I’m not writing this column to whine about that. It’s part of human nature. I get it.

I’m writing this column because, maybe, now that folks are starting to face the fact that the whole “free-speech Twitter” thing was an elaborate con, or a trap, or a PSYOP, maybe, now, they can knock off the “Elon is our savior!” crap and try to pay attention to what is actually happening.

Here’s an example of what is actually happening …

Here’s a link to that Tweet with a recording of the Spaces thing. It’s Linda Yaccarino, X CEO, explaining how the new censorship system works. And here’s my favorite Yaccarino quote:

“Since acquisition, we have built brand-safety and content-moderation tools that have never before existed at this company. And we’ve introduced a new policy to [address?] your specific point about hate speech, called “Freedom of speech, not reach.”

What she’s talking about is the future of Internet censorship. Not the ham-fisted government-initiated censorship that people tend to think of when they think about censorship. Corporate censorship. “Free-market” censorship. What she’s talking about is the virtually imperceptible moment-by-moment manipulation of social-media content, search engine results, “reference” platforms like Wikipedia, everything most people see on the Internet. The corp-speak term is “visibility filtering.”

From now on, instead of being suspended or deplatformed — which is bad PR, and only draws more attention to the deplatformed party — dissident voices will be “deamplified.” We will be “free” to post whatever we like, but we will be talking to no one, in a digital void, which most people won’t even know exists. “Red/blue” culture-war mud-slinging content, and other such harmless entertainment that keeps the masses infuriated and at each other’s throats, will of course be allowed, and will be “amplified” and “monetized.” But any serious form of political dissent or deviation from official narratives will be labelled “hate speech,” “disinformation,” “malinformation,” or simply “unhealthy.” Corporations like X, Meta, Alphabet, and Tencent will decide what is “healthy.” They will do so with algorithms, but not only with algorithms.

Here’s Linda Yaccarino again, talking to CNBC this time …

“… X is committed to encouraging healthy behavior … 99.9% of all impressions are healthy … and we have an extraordinary team of people who are overseeing, hands on keyboards, monitoring, all day, every day, to make sure that that 99.9% of impressions remain at that number.”

I don’t know how much clearer she could make it. A team. Of people. Monitoring everything. Moment by moment. Every day. Not some badly-written algorithm. Not some secret cabal of mutinous Wokesters sabotaging Elon’s vision. Not the FBI. Not the CIA. Not the WEF. Not the Rothschilds. Just Twitter. Just X.

This isn’t one of my “conspiracy theories.” There is absolutely nothing secret about it. It’s all explained right here, and here, and here, and here, on the Twitter Safety blog.

Here’s one of the interstitial labels that Twitter might put on your “unhealthy” Tweet before they “deamplify” it into oblivion.

See! Twitter is, like, totally committed to transparency!

Of course, you have nothing to worry about if you are tweeting (or Xing?) “healthy” content. That “extraordinary Twitter-Safety team” that is monitoring everything “all day, every day,” would never “deamplify,” or “visibility-filter,” or otherwise censor political speech that isn’t “hate speech,” or … you know, use one of those interstitial labels to maliciously defame some troublesome author by deceiving people into thinking he was tweeting child pornography or graphic violent content, like bestiality, or necrophilia, or some other type of “age-restricted adult content,” as Twitter was doing to me until May of this year.

I’m just joking, of course. They’re going to keep doing that. Not to me anymore, not that way. (After I embarrassed Ella Irwin publicly, they removed the fake labels and just deamplified me.) But they are going to keep doing it to other people. And not just X. All the corporations. They are going to keep “visibility filtering,” and “deamplifying,” and vaporizing dissent, and there is currently nothing we can do about it.

Meanwhile, we (i.e., the “Free Speech Movement”) will be celebrating our “victory” over the bad apples in government who were forcing the poor, helpless global corporations to censor everyone until we took them to court and made them stop with our democratic rights! Then we’ll all live happily ever after!

I don’t mean to shit on my friends and colleagues who are fighting hard against government censorship. At least they’re actually achieving something, while I’m just sitting here running my mouth. And the fight against government censorship is important. It is vitally important. And it has to be fought. I support it wholeheartedly, and I applaud them for fighting it. But it isn’t going to change what’s happening.

What’s happening is, GloboCap, or Corporatism, or whatever you want to call the network of global corporations, governments, media, non-governmental governing entities, investment banks, global health authorities, academia, the culture industry, and other such entities that together comprise the decentralized system of power and ideology that is currently running the entire planet … whatever you want to call that, it’s going totalitarian.

It has been going totalitarian, more or less openly, for the better part of the last three years. I’ve been covering this transition for quite a while now, and I have reiterated my analysis in many of my essays, and I published a book about it, which is possibly going to get me sent to prison here in Germany, so I’m not going to rehash it all again here (which should come as a relief to my regular readers). If you’re new to my work, you can read the book, or my essays, which are all on my blog and my Substack.

For now, trust me, we are going totalitarian. That’s what all the “visibility filtering” is about. That’s what the “cancel culture” is about. That’s what all the mindless mass hysteria and the demonization and criminalization of dissent is about.

It’s what the “Free-Speech Twitter” PSYOP is about. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether Elon Musk even knows what he is doing. The system that he is an integral part of is evolving. Musk will help it evolve or he will be replaced by someone who will help it evolve. Musk, Yaccarino, Zuckerberg, Pichai, Gates, Klaus Schwab, Wang Zhonglin, or pick your evil mastermind! These people, notwithstanding their very real power, are just components of a system, a global system, a system that is evolving toward totalitarianism, because it doesn’t really have anything else to do.

I do not know how to stop this from happening, this evolution of global capitalism into a new form of totalitarianism, but one thing that occurs to me is, it might help matters if we slowed down a bit and tried to actually understand what is happening, like in the broader, historical, systemic sense, and maybe didn’t chomp down on every little piece of red-meat bait that gets dangled in our faces, and then whipped up into a frenzy over whatever the visibility-filtering team at Twitter, or X, or Meta, or Alphabet, or some other corporation, wants us whipped up over.

Oh, and, maybe, next time some self-aggrandizing global-capitalist military contractor comes riding into town like Billionaire Jesus to save us from his buddies in the proverbial Big Club — you know, the one that you ain’t in — maybe folks could take a moment and at least hear me out before they start prostrating themselves at his feet.

I’m not right about everything, of course, but I seem to be doing OK with this PSYOP stuff.

###

CJ Hopkins
August 14, 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.

Today’s edition of the Two Minutes Hate, brought to you by GloboCap, Inc., and featuring an all-star line-up of GloboCap Goldsteins, will begin shortly. Please take your seat and switch off your remaining critical faculties. We’ve got a butt-load of hate in store for you today. First, though, a few important announcements.

First, due to the increased number of Goldsteins threatening the very fabric of democracy, and GloboCap, Inc., and its global partners, and their assorted subsidiaries, agents, and assigns, the Two Minutes Hate has been extended beyond its traditional two-minute running time and will henceforth be presented more or less around the clock until further notice.

Also, in a departure from the original Two Minutes Hate in Orwell’s 1984, we’re going to skip the opening “this is our land” part, which is (a) dated and (b) unacceptably unrepresentative of the racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of the New Normal Reich …

… and get right down to the “shrieking hatred at the images of Goldstein” part.

Please be advised that the following content contains material designed to whip the masses into a mindless frenzy of hatred, which some audiences may find distressing. Other audiences might find it amusing. After all, there’s no accounting for taste. Regardless of which audience you feel you are a member of, viewer discretion is not advised. In fact, exposure to the following content is pretty much mandatory, and is physically inescapable, unless you live “off-grid” in the woods somewhere, which you don’t, or you wouldn’t be reading this.

OK, that’s it for the pre-show announcements. Time for the hate! Ready? Here we go.

Goldstein Number One is obviously Trump, who is both a Russian asset and literally Hitler. The fact that Trump is literally Hitler was conclusively established in 2017 by Ron Rosenbaum, who apparently wrote a book about Hitler, and is a “world expert on the Nazi leader,” according to The Independent.

But, even back in 2016, before the Russians “hacked the election” and stole the presidency from Hillary Clinton by “weaponizing African American voters” with anti-masturbation memes on Facebook, everybody already knew he was Hitler …

Plus, Jason Stanley (the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University!) and The New York Times proved it in this 2018 video! And the BBC found a random “German guy” who said it, so what more proof do you need? Even his former lawyer now confirms it!

But it isn’t just that Trump is literally Hitler, he’s also a literal Russian asset, as Jonathan Chait reported in New York Magazine in February of 2021! Of course, by that time, everybody already knew that he was a Russian operative, and a treasonous traitor, and Putin’s homosexual lover, as The New York Times revealed in this charming little animated film!

And all that was before he ordered his underground white-supremacist Putin-Nazi forces to try to overthrow the US government by frontally assaulting the Capitol Building with two or three hundred unarmed bozos and assorted federal agents in MAGA hats!

As Michael Fanone, a former DC cop who was brutally assaulted during the rioting, and who is currently a “law enforcement analyst” and an on-air contributor at CNN, put it when the latest indictment of Trump was announced …

“I felt proud to be an American, much of the way I did when when I learned that our military had killed Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden was a terrorist who committed a horrific act against American people and against our Republic. I believe Donald Trump is a terrorist who committed horrific acts against the American people.”

So, shout it out … TRUMP! TRAITOR! TERRORIST! PUTIN’S COCK HOLSTER! OSAMA BIN HITLER!

Goldstein Number Two is RFK, Jr., the infamous anti-vax conspiracy theorist, who is also Hitler, or is aligned with Trump, who is literally Hitler, and Osama bin Laden, and a Russian asset! Yes, that’s right, in addition to all his conspiracy-theorizing and anti-vaxxing, Bobby, Jr. has been tweeting secret “Nazi dog whistles,” presumably at the behest of Trump, who is presumably taking direct orders from Putin!

Also, according to The New Republic, not only is Bobby an anti-Semitic, Putin-loving, woman-hating transphobe, but he more or less drove his ex-wife to kill herself! On top of which, he is going around saying that the CIA assassinated JFK! Their sources are reporting that he is back on the heroin, and has joined some sort of GOP-funded Satanic neo-Nazi death cult!

That, or else he’s actually a covert “conspiracy-mongering Republican plant” or “a useful idiot for MAGA demagogues,” or some other type of science-denying, democracy-hating, Nazi traitor, which is Walter Shapiro’s current theory, also published by The New Republic, which is giving The Guardian a real run for its money as the go-to mouthpiece of the Ministry of Truth.

So, shout it out … RFK! ANTI-VAXXER! TRAITOR! TERRORIST! CONSPIRACY THEORIST! HITLER!

OK, you’re probably wondering why Putin isn’t Goldstein, being the Ultimate Source of All Evil, as he is, and the Hitler of All Hitlers, and the Antichrist, and so on. Well, there’s actually a very simple explanation.

See, the thing is, Goldsteins have to be traitors. It’s essential to their Goldsteinness. Putin, evil though he definitely is, is not a traitor, not “a cancer, an evil tumor, growing, spreading in our midst” (see original Two Minutes Hate).

The Two Minutes Hate is designed to condition the masses to unleash their hatred against the traitors, the Judases, the dissidents, the apostates, the deniers of Reality, the deniers of Truth, the science deniers, the Covid deniers, the climate-change deniers, the deniers of … whatever. The “racists.” The “transphobes.” The “anti-Semites.” “Anti-vaxxers.” “Conspiracy theorists.” “Far-right extremists.” “Insurrectionists.” “Terrorists.”

There’s no shortage of Goldsteins in The New Normal Reich. There never is in any totalitarian system … not even one that masquerades as “democracy.” The essence of all totalitarianism is conformity, and mindless hatred of non-conformity, and demonization of any form of dissent, and, ultimately, the criminalization of dissent. It’s the Goldsteins here at home that need to be dealt with! The disinformationists! The malinformationists! The “free-speech” subversives who want to debate us!

New Normals don’t debate or argue with Goldsteins. They shun them. They “cancel” them. They censor them. They report them. They delegitimize them. They vaporize them. They vent all their pent-up hatred at them … their crippling self-hatred, and their shame, and their rage.

Because the other thing The Two Minutes Hate is designed to do is direct that rage and hatred at an appropriate official scapegoat. Totalitarians need to blow off steam. Mindlessly following senseless orders and robotically parroting official propaganda that you know is a bunch of lies is no fun. Repressing the rage and shame that produces, after a while, can make you want to … gosh, I don’t know, take some folks out in the woods somewhere and shoot them in the back of the head, or lock them up in a camp, or something. It’s better to get all that out of your system in a structured, emotionally-supportive setting, or on a DHS-moderated social-media platform, or the balcony of your Central Park South apartment, as Keith Olbermann did back in 2021.

So go ahead, shout it out one more time! Fill in the names of all the Goldsteins in your life … or, you know, formerly in your life. The traitors! The deniers! The anti-vaxxers! The Russia-loving far-right extremists! The racists! The transphobes! The anti-Semites! You’ll feel so much better once you have … or at least you’ll feel a little relief that will get you through until the next Two Minutes Hate!

All right, that’s it for today’s Two Minutes Hate. I hope it wasn’t too emotionally distressing. Oh, yeah, and if you’re a member of one of those “other audiences” I referred to above … well, I told you I thought you might find it amusing. I would probably keep that to myself, though, if I were you. You never know when The New Normal Reich is going to go full-blown totalitarian again!

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CJ Hopkins
August 4, 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 quadrennial simulation of democracy in the USA is getting underway, and personally, I couldn’t be happier. It’s been a challenging few years for unincorporated political satirists like myself. The roll-out of the new global-capitalist totalitarianism hasn’t been particularly funny. In fact, it has been extremely not funny. Squeezing a little humor out of it has been like trying to suck a golf ball through a garden hose.

Not that the New Normal Reich is history … on the contrary, it is just getting started. Yes, the shock-and-awe campaign is over. It’s been over for the better part of a year. We are deep into the mistakes-were-made/limited-hangout phase of the changeover. Nothing can stop or reverse it now. The implementation of the new official (i.e., Orwellian) reality is a fait accompli. What actually happened has been memory-holed, forever, supplanted by stories of censorious “bad apples,” “overreactions,” lab leaks, and so on. Those who are old enough will recall this phase from the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq. It’s going pretty much by the numbers.

Which … fine. That “reality” stuff was ruining my shtick. No one wants to be told that they’re the victim of an elaborate PSYOP, which is what I’ve been doing for the past three years, with one demographic after another. First, I alienated most of my friends and colleagues, and even family members, by challenging “The Science” (which has now been debunked) and opposing the transformation of the planet into a pathologized-totalitarian police state. Then, when I warned people about Elon Musk and the whitewashing of Twitter, or X, or whatever we are calling his Chinese-style “everything app,” which, if Elon has his way, we’re all going to “live on” in the visibility-filtered, advert-saturated, dystopian, global-capitalist future … well, that pretty much did it for the rest of my audience.

Not you, of course … the other rest of my audience. See, part of the genius of the New Normal Reich is how it has completely polarized society. It has systematically divided the masses into two irreconcilable warring camps, both of which demand absolute conformity to their dogma from their respective members. That isn’t to imply that there’s parity between them. The one camp, “the New Normals,” is backed by state and corporate power. The other camp, “the anti-New Normals,” is not. It’s no secret where my sympathies lie.

The problem, for me, is, I don’t do well in camps. Any kind of camps. I’m not a camp person. I have an aversion to self-appointed leaders, or an oppositional-defiant disorder, or something. Or maybe I’ve just seen too many movements congeal into irrelevant countercultural ghettos where people blow off steam in a virtual vacuum and get preyed on by hucksters and ten-cent gurus … or 240-billion-dollar gurus.

So, screw it, I’m going back to comedy, or at least I’m going to give it a try, and the upcoming US election season should provide me with the perfect material!

For example, this piece in The New Republic about the horror a new Trump term would bring. It’s basically a “Return of the Revenge of the Curse of the Bride of the Son of Hitler”-type piece … you know, like one of those 1970s Hammer horror films with Christopher Lee.

That’s right, he’s back … Trumpenstein, the monster! It’s the Second Coming of Literal Hitler! Vladimir Putin’s personal cock holster! The pussy-grabbing Destroyer of Worlds! According to Brynn Tannehill and The New Republic, it is “goodbye NATO … goodbye democracy!” Hello to the new-and-improved Trumpian Reich!

To folks who know their 20th-Century history, the story-line will be eerily familiar. Like Hitler returning from Landsberg prison, where he wrote Mein Kampf after the “Beer Hall Putsch” …

“[Trump] is coming back with the entire conservative apparatus at his back, having spent four years in the wilderness methodically planning how to permanently alter the political and legal landscape of the country to favor an anti-democratic minority.”

Apparently, Trump’s evil master plan this time revolves around reinstituting “Schedule F” for federal employees, which would allow him to fire anyone with “policy-making authority” and replace them with hate-crazed Nazi fanatics. Brynn explains the utter horror this will lead to.

“… a Trump administration would replace vast swathes of the federal government bureaucracy with sycophants and ideological fellow travelers bent on implementing pro-corporate, pro-religious, and anti-minority agendas. This weaponizes the entire federal bureaucracy against women and LGBTQ people.” 

Shortly thereafter, the genocide will begin.

“The right intends to use every power of the government to eradicate anything it considers woke, particularly transgender people.” 

According to Brynn, once Trump has mass-murdered all the transgender people, and the gay people, and women, and presumably the Jews, and African-Americans, and whoever else he’s planning to mass-murder, he will fire and replace all the generals and admirals, arrest all his political and personal enemies, and declare himself American Führer for life!

And so on. I think you get the idea. The most powerful propaganda machine in the history of propaganda is revving up again. It’s going to be a year-long Two Minutes Hate, with Donald Trump playing the part of Goldstein. The message is, Trump, and his master, Putin, and THE FORCES OF UNSPEAKABLE HITLERIAN EVIL, and Covid, and global boiling, and whatever, are slouching toward Washington to DESTROY DEMOCRACY, and, this time, they’re not screwing around! The only way to prevent the Trumpocalypse will be to visibility-filter the hell out of everything (except, of course, for free-speech Twitter), lock down everyone when things get unruly, and just basically go full-blown totalitarian again. It won’t be very difficult to set in motion. All they will need to do is get Rachel Maddow to shriek “IMMINENT COVID GLOBAL-WARMING INSURRECTION!” and the New Normal masses will strap on their masks and start clicking heels and following orders.

Seriously, they’re already breaking out the Trump-is-Literally-Hitler routine, and the official election season hasn’t even started!

Selfishly speaking, I can’t wait for it to begin. The global-capitalist ruling classes are not going to let him win again, but they’re clearly preparing to whip the masses into a full-blown frenzy of ass-puckering PARANOIA and MINDLESS HATRED of anyone even marginally deviating from official ideology, and I plan to milk that show for as many laughs as possible. I may not be able to stop what’s coming, but, in the immortal words of a very drunk Jim Morrison, I just want to get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.

Of course, I’ll probably be doing that in my new accommodations in German prison, where I’ll be serving time for comparing the roll-out of the New Normal to the rise of Nazi Germany. For those of you who think I’m joking, I am not. I am under criminal investigation in Berlin for comparing New Normal totalitarianism to Nazism, which, comparing anything to the Nazis is strictly prohibited in Germany … unless, of course, you’re comparing Trump to the Nazis, in which case, that’s fine …

… or, as the Germans like to say, in Ordnung!

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CJ Hopkins
July 31, 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.

Greetings from Thoughtcriminal 231Js1736/23!

That’s my official Thoughtcrime Case Number, which my attorney needs to reference in all our official correspondence with the New Normal Thoughtpolice. I think I’m going to silk-screen it on a T-shirt and wear it on my first day in Moabit Criminal Court, “the largest criminal court in Europe with 340 judges and 360 prosecutors.”

That’s right, the Berlin State Prosecutor’s office is pursuing its criminal investigation of me for allegedly “disseminating propaganda, the content of which is intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization,” which according to Germany’s Grundgesetz could send me to prison for up to three years.

My attorney wrote to them and politely explained how ridiculous their investigation is and why they should summarily drop the charges, but New Normal Germany has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to Thoughtcrime, especially Thoughtcrime involving any kind of Covid-denying propaganda.

The “propaganda” in question is these two Tweets.

Which, OK, I just disseminated them again, so there’s another three years in prison. Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s six years in prison, i.e., three years for each separate count of Thoughtcrime.

I wrote those Tweets in German, so let me translate.

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 hashtag translates as “Masks are not a benign measure.”

The one on the right is a quote by Karl Lauterbach, the Minister of Health of Germany, tweeted by Die Welt, a national newspaper. It reads “The masks always send out a signal.” And, yes, Karl, that’s exactly the point I was making.

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 the above Tweets. (It appears to also be banned for sale in German bookstores, but I don’t have confirmation of that.)

My attorney just received the screenshots of these Tweets from the Berlin State Prosecutor a few days ago. Up to then, we didn’t know what they were, and we couldn’t find them, because they have been censored by Twitter, presumably on the orders of the German Thoughtpolice. We knew they featured the cover art of my book, because the Prosecutor’s office described it, but we didn’t know about the “Covid denial.”

So, essentially, I’m facing criminal charges, and being threatened with who knows how many years in prison, or thousands of Eurodollars in fines, for (a) stating what has now been widely acknowledged, and what was generally understood by every serious epidemiologist until the Spring of 2020, namely, that mask-mandates do not work, and thus are nothing but symbolic measures designed to generate and enforce mass obedience, and (b) insulting the Minister of Health of Germany, who happens to be a fanatical serial liar who is directly responsible for the serious injury and death of … well, we’ll never know how many people.

Neither of which are actual crimes. Not even in the Federal Republic of Germany.

The pretext for the charges I am facing is the swastika behind the mask, which, as I noted in a recent essay, is a play on the international bestseller, The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich, by William Shirer, which you can buy in any bookshop in Berlin.

Incidentally, my book has also been a bestseller, at least on Amazon (in countries where it’s not banned) and Barnes & Noble, but I’ve still got a little ways to go before I get to Shirer territory.

So, there you are … those are my Thoughtcrimes.

I’ve been writing about the “New Normal” as a new form of totalitarianism for several years now. I wrote about it in one of my essays, The Criminalization of Dissent, in May of 2021. Some of my colleagues rolled their eyes. They thought I was being hyperbolic again. I wasn’t. This is what I meant. It is literally the criminalization of dissent.

I wasn’t the only one covering the story of the criminalization of dissent in Germany. The New York Times reported on it in April of 2021 …

“The country’s domestic intelligence agency says it will create a new department to deal with extremism among conspiracy theorists.” (German Intelligence Puts Coronavirus Deniers Under Surveillance)

As did Aljazeera …

“For intelligence officers to be legally allowed to start observing parts of the anti-lockdown movement, Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) had to create an entirely new category of groups because the ‘Querdenkers’ do not fit neatly into the existing classifications of right-wing or left-wing. The new category is for groups suspected of being ‘anti-democratic and/or delegitimizing the state in a way that endangers security.’ The designation allows intelligence officers to gather data about individuals and their activities, and could in a further step include shadowing people and tapping their communications.” (German Spy Agency to Monitor Some Anti-Lockdown Protesters)

I was not a member of the “Querdenker” movement, or any other movement for that matter, but I doubt that makes any difference to the BfV or the Berlin State Prosecutor. Anyone even vaguely prominent who spoke out against the “Corona measures” is fair game for threats and prosecution. The beneficent-sounding Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, or BfV, is basically Germany’s FBI. It’s now two years after the above stories were published, and they are still on the hunt for “Covid deniers,” “conspiracy theorists,” and other such persons suspected of “delegitimizing the state” … whatever that Orwellian language means.

Of course, it doesn’t matter what it means. It means whatever they say it means. That’s what it means. It means it doesn’t mean anything, and they do not have to pretend it means anything. It means, “Shut the fuck up. Get in line. Do what we tell you. Say what we tell you. Think what we tell you. Or we will fucking get you. We will make up some charges and prosecute you. We will censor you into Internet oblivion. We will shut off your fucking bank account. We’ll send the IRS to your house. We’ll ruin your career. We’ll hurt your family. We will extradite you to the USA and lock you up in Supermax prison for 175 fucking years.”

How am I doing? Do I sound hyperbolic?

And, no, of course I’m not just talking about Germany. The criminalization of dissent is being rolled out everywhere. Ireland is just the latest of dozens of countries all throughout the West that are criminalizing so-called “hate speech.” The specifics are different but the message is the same, “Watch what you say, or we will prosecute you, or otherwise seriously fuck you up.”

Oh, and also, I should probably mention, my lawyer advised me not to republish those Tweets. He completely understands where I am coming from, but it is his job to look out for me and to try his best to … you know, keep me out of German prison, which I’m not making easy for him.

Now, I want to be very clear about this. I have no desire to go to German prison. I am about to turn 62 years old. I’m not at all interested in tossing anyone’s salad or having my salad tossed by anyone, especially not a pumped-up, tattooed member of some local Turkish drug gang, or an actual German neo-Nazi, but I’m not going to be intimidated into shutting up or toning my act down to placate the New Normal Thoughtpolice.

The thing is, I don’t respond well to bullies. I feel a particular antipathy toward them. I’m not very fond of liars either. And totalitarians … there’s another group of people I don’t like. I am not ashamed to admit my bias against such people. I wish them ill. I am sorry about whatever vicissitudes of fortune or experience turned them into lying, bullying, totalitarian creeps, but they can suck foul wind out of my ass if they think I am going to bow down to them. They can do what they want to me. They have that power. They can silence me for a while if they want. But they cannot make me silence myself.

And they cannot make me pretend to respect them.

The Germans are real big on respecting authority. So am I. But authority is earned. It does not stem from a title or a uniform. It stems from knowledge, experience, integrity, and honorable behavior, not from brute force. Fascists, totalitarians, and the like do not deserve our respect. They deserve our scorn. They deserve our derision. I have plenty of it for them.

Also, there are the kids to think about. I don’t have any, but other people do. What kind of an example are we setting for the kids if we start censoring (or “sensitivity-editing”) ourselves every time some fascist bully threatens to put us in jail if we don’t? A lot of the young people are already pretty pussified as it is these days. I’m certainly not a tough guy or anything, but sometimes, in life, you have to fight, and it doesn’t really matter if you get your ass kicked.

Oh, and, if you’re contemplating writing to me and telling me to “get the hell out of Germany” or inquiring as to why I haven’t “gotten the hell out of Germany,” please do not do that. I am extremely tired of hearing it. Instead, just wire a high six-figure sum into the Swiss account I will be setting up shortly, and, I promise you, I’ll get the hell out of Germany, and send you a postcard from an undisclosed location somewhere in the Ionian Sea.

In the meantime, I’ll definitely keep you posted on Case 231Js1736/23, and maybe I’ll go ahead and do up that T-shirt. Wait, what am I thinking? This is New Normal Berlin! I could find a VC, round up some 20-year-old, transgender, Ayahuasca-guzzling tech bros (or “tech persons with penises” or whatever the proper “non-harmful” nomenclature is at the moment), and start up some type of totally Bitcoined bespoke Thoughtcriminal T-shirt business!

The way things are going, I’ll probably make a killing … or at least I’ll be able to cover my legal costs, which, after that last little gratuitous outburst, Lord knows what kind of new charges I’ll be facing!

###

CJ Hopkins
July 3, 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.

Our descent into City Airport was like the drop-ship scene in the movie Aliens. The BA CityFlyer Embraer 190, a narrow-body twin-engine airliner, rolled over into a 40-degree bank and started bucking like a mechanical bull. Simulated “chimes” began chiming frantically. Flight attendants bolted for their seats. The German businessman in the seat beside me, obviously a nervous flyer, immediately adopted the “brace” position. I gripped his shoulder reassuringly and shouted into his ear like a drunken redneck, “WE’RE ON AN EXPRESS ELEVATOR TO HELL! GOING DOWN!”

And so began my latest trip to London. This time, I wasn’t there to talk to “the Left” or to hunt down endoparasitoid xenomorphs. I was there on Serious Conspiracy Theorist Business, which I explained to the chirpy MI6 operative posing as a “survey taker” that followed me out of Border Control asking questions about my “nation of residence” and my “experience with the passport scanners,” and so on. She was wearing one of those rubber “Mission Impossible” masks that made her look like a middle-aged British woman. I waited for an opportunity, head faked, juked right, and lost her in the crowd. As I entered the “Arrivals” lobby, I turned and shouted in her general direction, “NOT MY FIRST RODEO, MR. PHELPS!”

I don’t know what was up with all the shouting. I’ve been experimenting with different types of medication for this sinus condition I’ve had for months. My Sinus Specialist diagnosed me with “long” or possibly “permanent Covid,” or some yet-to-be-named debilitating syndrome caused by some other bio-weapon that produces cold-and-flu-like symptoms and has a survival rate of 99.8 percent. So, maybe it was bad reaction to my meds. Whatever it was, I was feeling jumpy.

And the climate-change apocalypse didn’t help. Emerging from the Tube in Westminster was like walking into an enormous open-air sauna. Bodies were lying all around on the sidewalks. AFP photographers in hazmat suits were taking pictures of the carnage. Herds of corpulent American tourists staggered through the streets in semi-fugue states sweating profusely and thumbing their phones like an invasion of alien albino hippos trying to call up to their UAPs and arrange for immediate emergency extraction. I pushed and shoved and elbowed my way down Tothill Street to my pod hotel, checked in, and proceeded to get hopelessly lost in the maze of identical Kubrickian hallways that eventually led me to my luxury pod, and cleaned myself up for the night’s festivities.

What was I doing back in London in the middle of a heat wave? Well … OK, I’m allowed to tell you about it now. As you are probably aware, Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Russell Brand were doing this public event last Thursday …

… but that’s not what I was really there for.

Not that the Thursday event wasn’t fun. It was. Despite the rather pricey tickets, there was a good size house and spirits were high. Russell Brand was in top form, pouring out torrents of intellectual free-association like an English Neal Cassady and nailing the punchlines of all the jokes. Michael was also firing on all cylinders. He worked the house like a seasoned politician, whipping the crowd into a veritable frenzy of anti-totalitarian fervor. Stella Assange took the stage at one point and briefed us on the official crucifixion of her husband, which, sadly, now looks like a fait accompli. Matt, who had just made it to London that morning, and so was jet-lagged and delieriously sleep-deprived, dispensed with the speech he had rewritten on the plane, and just winged it, and somehow pulled it off … because that, as they say, is show biz.

Here’s the money part of Matt’s speech, which he paraphrased in London (emphasis mine):

“What Michael and I were looking at was something new, an Internet-age approach to political control that uses brute digital force to alter reality itself. We certainly saw plenty of examples of censorship and de-platforming and government collaboration in those efforts. However, it’s clear that the idea behind the sweeping system of digital surveillance combined with thousands or even millions of subtle rewards and punishments built into the online experience, is to condition people to censor themselves.“

Early the next morning, Michael, Matt, and a secret cabal of international journalists, editors, organizers, political satirists, academics, and other Very Serious People whose names I am not at liberty to mention gathered in an undisclosed location and spent the better part of the day sharing harmful misinformation and strategizing about how to defeat (or marginally disrupt) the network of governments, Intelligence agencies, global corporations, NGOs, and so-called disinformation experts known as the Censorship Industrial Complex. There were delegates from the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and other nominally sovereign countries.

This heretofore clandestine meeting was conducted in what appeared to be a WWII-era air-raid shelter that had been converted into a private BDSM club under military-level OPSEC protocols (i.e., the meeting was conducted according to the protocols, not the architectural conversion). I’m not entirely sure why that was. We weren’t doing anything even remotely illegal. However, given that I’m under criminal investigation here in Germany for tweeting the cover art of my book, and the IRS’s sudden interest in Matt, and Kit Klarenberg’s recent experience in Luton, perhaps the abundance of caution was warranted. The last thing we needed was the UK Thoughtpolice goose-stepping in like Basil Fawlty and dragging everyone off to Room 101.

Anyway, that’s what I was actually there for. I had never met most of the people in attendance, except online on the double-encrypted Russian-backed dark-web conspiracy-theorist channels where we hatch our right-wing-extremist plots to defend people’s rights to freedom-of-speech and engage in other harmful anti-Democracy behaviors. I’m still not sure who I actually met in London, as we were all wearing identical Mickey-Mouse masks and speaking through portable voice modifiers. (In any secret meeting like this, you have to assume you’ve been infiltrated!)

After the obligatory arguing about the agenda, we settled in and shared our country reports, which, unsurprisingly, were all variations on a theme. I won’t go into all the details. Michael Shellenberger’s non-profit has been tracking those developments. Matt Taibbi and Racket News are reporting it. Other alternative media outlets are reporting it. Millions of people all around the world are talking about it, writing about it, and arguing with each other about it. Your Twitter feed is probably full of it. Alex Gutentag just published a huge article about it.

So, what is it, exactly, that is going on?

The thing that was horrifying about listening to my colleagues reporting on the state of things in their countries — or, rather, the thing that should be horrifying but is becoming a mundane fact of life — is that more or less the same totalitarian program is being rolled out in countries throughout the world. The censorship. The official propaganda. The criminalization of dissent. The pathologization of dissent. The manipulation of our perception of reality. The coordinated transformation of the world into a smiley-faced neo-Orwellian police state in which politics no longer matters because society has been divided into two basic classes, i.e., “the normals,” who are prepared to mindlessly follow orders and parrot whatever official propaganda they are fed, and “the deviants,” or “extremists,” who are not.

Seriously, all satire aside, think about the implications of that.

As you sit there in whichever nominally sovereign country you’re sitting there reading this in, ask yourself, “how and why is this happening?” Then ask yourself, “why is it happening now?”

If you do not have answers to those questions, it might behoove you to attempt to come up with some. That is basically what I’ve been trying to do — in a satirical and sometimes not so satirical manner — in these Consent Factory essays for the last seven years. I’m not going to summarize it all again here. I’ve done that, repeatedly, in my essays and books. I did it the last time I visited London to give a talk at the Real Left Conference.

I did it again at this gathering in London. It did not go over all that well.

The thing is, most of us are so laser-focused on the trees that we cannot see the forest. But our adversaries see the forest. They see the forest like fucking eagles. They own the fucking forest and everything in it. While we hop like squirrels from tree to tree, distracted from distraction by distraction, from limited hangout by limited hangout, they are building a big fucking fence around it and deploying the Forest-Ranger Sturmabteilung.

I’m reminded of that infamous Karl Rove quote. He was referring to the USA, of course, but it was GloboCap (i.e., the Corporatocracy) that he was really speaking for whether he knew it or not …

“That’s not the way the world really works anymore … we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” [The New York Times Magazine]

If we do not want to end up “studying that reality,” the global, pathologized-totalitarian reality that is being subtly and not so subtly implemented simultaneously in countries throughout the world, at some point we had better come up with some actual answers to those questions above.

The supranational, globally-hegemonic, post-ideological system of power that runs our world — whatever you need to call it — has answers to those questions. It has a story. It is a story about a beneficent global empire governed by authoritative scientific experts who are trying to save the world from Whatever and protect everyone from “disinformation” and “harmful” speech, ideas, and so on. Like every good story, it has an antagonist. Us. We are the official enemy. Right, Left, libertarian, anarchist, Islamic fundamentalist, Christian fundamentalist … it does not make one iota of difference. There is only the Empire, and those who oppose it. The Empire does not give a shit why. It is conducting a global “Clear-and-Hold” operation, wiping out internal resistance and establishing ideological uniformity. It could not care less what you think you believe in. All it wants is mindless obedience and rote repetition of its propaganda. That’s how totalitarianism works.

And there I go with my story again. If anyone has a different story that makes sense of the last seven years — and arguably the last 30 years — honestly, I would love to hear it. My story fills me with fear and loathing, but the only other coherent story I’m hearing at the moment is the Empire’s story, and I think we all know how that one ends.

###

CJ Hopkins
June 27, 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.

The first rule of New Normal Germany is “You Do Not Compare New Normal Germany to Nazi Germany!” I did that on the cover of my bestselling book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich, so the State Prosecutor’s office in Berlin has launched a criminal investigation of me for allegedly “disseminating propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization,” which is punishable by up to three years in prison.

Actually, the first rule of New Normal Germany is “Shut Up, Click Heels, and Follow Orders!” I think the second rule is probably the one about not comparing New Normal Germany to Nazi Germany.

Which is totally reasonable. After all, Nazi Germany was not just one type of totalitarian social system among others, like Maoist China, Fascist Italy, the USSR under Stalin, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and other totalitarian social systems that you’re allowed to compare New Normal Germany to. And, even if it was (i.e., one example of totalitarianism, among others, and not the incomparably singular and utterly unprecedented historical event that it was), there is no such thing as totalitarianism anymore, so you can’t compare any present-day system, or movement, or widespread sociopolitical phenomenon, to it (i.e., to Nazi Germany), or to any of those other totalitarian systems, especially not in New Normal Germany.

If you do … well, this is what happens.

You want to see a picture of my “propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization,” don’t you? Sure you do. All right, here you go.

My book is the one on the right, of course. The other book is the international bestseller, The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich, by William Shirer, which has sold, I don’t know, a gadzillion copies since it was published in 1960, and which you can buy in any bookshop in Germany, and which is absolutely not “propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.”

And here’s a frame from Rammstein’s music video, Deutschland, in which the Rammstein guys dress up like both Nazis and concentration camp prisoners, which is also not “propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.”

Oh, and, here is a Tweet by Jessica Berlin, a political analyst and expert in security issues and international development, and a former fellow of The German Marshall Fund of the United States, and the founder and Managing Director of something called CoStruct, where she advises governments, foundations, investment funds, NGOs, and companies large and small on strategy and program design to tackle global challenges with sustainable, scalable solutions, and who is also a commentator at Deutsche Welle News, Washington Post, BBC World Service, Tagesspiegel, ZDF, et al., which is also absolutely not (i.e., Jessica’s Tweet is not) “propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.”

OK, yes, Jessica tweeted the same photograph of a bunch of little Nazi girls waving little Nazi flags with swastikas on them that I tweeted back in 2021 (I think), and wrote “they are back,” referring to the Nazis, but Jessica was referring to people in Frankfurt who were supporting Russia instead of … well, you know, the totally non-Nazi Azov Detachment, or “Division,” or whatever they are calling themselves now, and the other Nazi-regalia-wearing heroes that New Normal Germany is supporting and arming, whereas I was referring to the decent, well-meaning, “unfortunately mistaken,” order-following people all around the world who were persecuting “the Unvaccinated,” and who wanted to lock us up in “quarantine camps,” and forcibly experimentally “vaccinate” us.

But, seriously, this investigation is a joke … and it’s not. The Berlin authorities have the power to imprison me for up to three years, or to fine me thousands of Eurodollars, for tweeting the artwork on the cover of my book.

Apparently, I tweeted an image of the book cover (or at least the cover art of the book) on my birthday, August 24, 2022 at 5:51 P.M. CET, and then again on August 27, 2022 at 8:47 P.M. CET, according to the notice of Ermittlungsverfahren from the Staatsanwaltschaft Berlin. (Yes, I’ve just used the German terms for comic effect, so they can add that to my charges.) If you understand German or would just like to see what an Ermittlungsverfahren notice from the Staatsanwaltschaft Berlin looks like, there’s a photo of it in my recent Substack post.

I can’t go into all the details of my case, and I am certainly not going to argue it in this column — my lawyer’s job is challenging enough; I mean, imagine having me for a client — but I can fill you in on life in New Normal Germany and share some of my personal emotional feelings about the country I have called home for almost twenty years now.

My personal emotional feelings are, it sucks. It didn’t used to suck. It used to be lovely. When I arrived here in Berlin in 2004, the city was still in its “poor but sexy” phase. It reminded me of my years in San Francisco in the early 1980s, before the dotcom boom, except for all the bullet holes in the facades of buildings from the Russian machine guns, and the Stolpersteine, and … well, everyone speaking German. I was still “poor but sexy” back then, and in the throes of an extended midlife crisis (i.e., running around making a fool of myself with Berlin club kids half my age, tripping on mushrooms in Volkspark Friedrichshain, and engaging in other degenerate behaviors), so it seemed the perfect place to set up camp in Europe.

And it was … until the Spring of 2020.

Given its history and the character of its denizens, Berlin felt like the last place on Earth that was ever going to go totalitarian again … and then it did. In the blink of an eye. Like someone had flipped a big “fascism on” switch.

Constitutional rights were abruptly cancelled. Protests against the New Normal were banned. The German media started pumping out propaganda like a Goebbelisan keyboard instrument. Public displays of conformity were mandated. “The Unvaccinated” were banned from society. Hate drunk mobs of New Normal Germans began hunting down maskless people on trains. By the end of it, the government was making plans to forcibly “vaccinate” the entire population.

I’m not going to tell the whole story again here. I told it in the book. I told it as it happened. I told it these Consent Factory columns …

The Storming of the Reichstag Building on 29 August, 2020 (September 2020)
The Germans Are Back! (November 2020)
The “Unvaccinated” Question (March 2021)
The Criminalization of Dissent (May 2021)
Greetings From New Normal Germany (May 2021)
The Road to Totalitarianism (July 2021)
The Year of the New Normal Fascist (December 2021)
The Rise of the New Normal Reich (May 2022)
The Federal Republic of New Normal Germany (June 2022)
The Normalization of the New Normal Reich (July 2022)
The “Unvaccinated” Question Revisited (August 2022)
New Normal Germany’s Geisterfahrer Geist (August 2022)
The Rise of the New Normal Reich, Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III,
(2020-2021) banned in Germany, Austria, and The Netherlands (August 2022)

… and in many other non-New-Normal-Germany-related columns.

As anyone who has read those columns or the book knows, “The New Normal Reich” does not refer to Germany exclusively. I have also written extensively about the New Normal USA, the New Normal United Kingdom, New Normal Canada, New Normal Australia, and various other New Normal countries, none of which, as far as I’m aware, are attempting to imprison me for my writing, currently.

But Germany is sensitive about its Nazi history, and, well, who wouldn’t be? I certainly would be. If I were a member of the German government, or the police, or the media, or the culture industry, I probably wouldn’t take very kindly to an American writer reminding everyone of when my people tried to conquer Europe, and systematically murdered millions of Jews and assorted other types of human beings because they thought they were the “master race.”

Of course, the New Normal has nothing to do with the Jews, or the Holocaust, or even Nazism, specifically. As I’ve written and stated in my columns and my interviews, the New Normal is a new form of totalitarianism … totalitarianism, of which Nazism is one example among others.

It happens to be a really good example … and it is an example that I am allowed to cite when I am writing and speaking about totalitarianism, or else The Universal Declaration of Human Rights means nothing.

The German authorities understand this. They’re not total idiots. They attended universities. Some of them studied political science, and logic, and even 20th-Century history. They know the difference between pro-Nazi propaganda and anti-totalitarian artwork. They know how absurd the charges against me are, but they have to be pursued, because … well, orders are orders!

And it isn’t just the German authorities. As I’ve tried to explain in my essays, and in the book, and at a recent “Real Left” conference in London, the New Normal is a global phenomenon. GloboCap, Inc. (i.e., global capitalism, or global corporatism, or whatever anyone needs to call the supranational network of global corporations, governments, banks, military contractors, media and entertainment conglomerates, pharmaceutical goliaths, imperious oligarchs, non-governmental governing entities, etc., that are currently running the world) is done playing grab-ass. Grab-Ass time is over. They are going totalitarian on us. It isn’t your grandfather’s totalitarianism. It is a new, global-capitalist form of totalitarianism. However, like every other form of totalitarianism, its ultimate goal is ideological uniformity and control of every aspect of society through a process the Nazis referred to as “Gleichschaltung.”

That process is well underway at the moment. The New Normal authorities and their diverse associates are implementing a variety of societal-control systems, censorship and “visibility-filtering” of speech, digital currencies, restrictions on movement, the enforcement of radical ideological dogmas, and so on. And they are aggressively cracking down on dissent.

One of the most repulsive aspects of their efforts to persecute political dissidents, censor our speech, and otherwise implement “New Normal Gleichschaltung” throughout the planet is the cynical way they’re using the Holocaust and false accusations of anti-Semitism as pretexts. If you wanted to make a mockery of the memory of the Holocaust and the dignity of its victims and “further the aims of a former National Socialist organization” … well, I cannot imagine a better way to do it.

I’ll keep you posted on the investigation, and I’ll try my best to not go full “Late Lenny Bruce” and start publishing trial transcripts verbatim. In the meantime, some of us are gathering in London to discuss what to do about what Michael Shellenberger has dubbed the Censorship Industrial Complex. So it’s back to the Big Smoke once again, assuming the Germans let me leave the country.

###

CJ Hopkins
June 12, 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, it was touch and go there for a while, but it appears “free speech” has been saved again! All hell broke loose at Musk Cult HQ (also known by Musk Cultists as “Musktown”). It felt like the final days were upon us!

OK, what happened was, the Communist Wokesters who are secretly still in control of Twitter pulled a fast one on our beloved leader! They are a devious bunch, those Commie Wokesters, and they’re out to destroy Elon’s beautiful dream of a free-speech-but-not-free-reach utopia!

The situation was still pretty fluid this morning, and I was getting a lot of conflicting reports, but, the word from San Francisco was, Elon had donned a pair of those scary 1970s Jim Jones sunglasses and was wandering around the Twitter campus with a megaphone rambling about “traitors” and “spies.” Delivery trucks bearing the “Flavor Aid” logo had been spotted crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. Senior Twitter Trust and Safety executives were golden-parachuting from upper-floor windows. Or something more or less along those lines.

But, seriously, what happened was, Free Speech Twitter “visibility filtered” Matt Walsh’s film, What is a Woman?, and Musk cultists’ brains were literally short-circuiting …

The poor Musk cultists could not believe that their beloved leader, a multi-billionaire military contractor and world-class huckster who wants to put computerized chips in their heads, had betrayed them. After all, he promised he wouldn’t! Or, I don’t know, maybe he didn’t …

In any event, it was pandemonium in the VIP Lounge at Musk Cult HQ. The wailing of assorted senior Musk Cultists resounded all across the Internet. “It can’t be Elon! No, not our Elon! Elon would never do this to us! This has to be the work of the secret evil cabal of culturally-Marxist censors who are sabotaging Elon’s dream of saving the Internet from the Bad Blue People! Yes, that’s it! It was Ella Irwin and her cocaine-addled Commonist Twitter moles!” (In case it wasn’t already obvious, that “Ella Irwin” tweet above is a fake.)

For a moment there, I was getting a little worried that we were looking at another Jonestown-type deal. But then, of course, right on cue, Elon swooped in and saved “free speech” from the evil Commie Wokesters, again!

Who could have possibly predicted that?!

It’s amazing, isn’t it, how Elon Musk keeps saving free speech from his own fucking company? He’s like Captain America, Jesus Christ, and P.T. Barnum all rolled into one!

Anyway, it appears the Musktown Massacre has been averted, or postponed. So that’s a huge relief. Meanwhile, Twitter censorship continues. But who cares? It’s not like anyone actually gives a flying fuck about free speech. It’s the “cult-versus-cult” competition that’s the thing! And the Musk Cult is kicking Covidian Cult ass!

Or the other way around. I’m not quite sure.

Whatever. As long as Elon allows us to “misgender” people on Twitter, we’re winning!

So, all together now, “THANK YOU, ELON MUSK!”

P.S. In case it isn’t clear, that Kim Dotcom tweet is not meant to be ironic.

###

CJ Hopkins
June 2, 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.

Roll up, roll up, because it’s time once again for The Anti-Anti-Semitism Follies! That’s right, folks, it’s everyone’s favorite unintentionally slapstick theatrical revue, featuring an all-star line-up of uproarious propagandists, side-splitting corporate media clowns, babbling British Labour MPs, the all-singing, all-dancing Berlin Police Department, and other zany anti-anti-Semites! Grab your popcorn and sit back and watch as they hunt down dastardly “Holocaust relativizers,” insidious critics of the State of Israel, and anyone who has ever used the word “globalism.” Hilarious high jinks are sure to ensue!

But, seriously, folks, this is no joke. We are in a bona fide State of Anti-Semitism Emergency! Throughout Western Europe, Israel, the UK, and coastal areas of the USA, the Anti-Semitism Alert Level has been bumped up to ORANGE! According to “anonymous Intelligence sources,” crackerjack Anti-Anti-Semitism commandos are en route to Torquay in the South of England, where rumor has it Roger Waters, John Cleese, Mel Brooks, and other notorious anti-Semites have gathered in a shabby seaside hotel and are staging some sort of hatred-inciting “Nazism Glorification Contest.”

Roger holds the lead, currently. Following his recent performances in Berlin, the police have opened an official criminal investigation into his … well, his clothing. “We are investigating suspected incitement to hatred,” a Berlin police spokesperson told the AFP. I’m not joking. The official ground for this investigation is the “dictator” costume Roger Waters has been wearing in his shows for over 40 years. You’ll recall this costume from the album The Wall …

… and the 1982 film of the same name.

You probably still think I’m joking. I’m not. The actual Berlin police department has launched an official investigation. “An investigation has been opened over the costume displayed at the concerts on 17 and 18 May,” Berlin police spokesperson Martin Halweg told the Guardian. “The context of the clothing worn is capable of approving, glorifying or justifying the violent and arbitrary rule of the Nazi regime in a manner that violates the dignity of the victims and thereby disrupts public peace,” according to Polizeisprecher Halweg (who delivered this line with the stereotypical over-the-top “evil German” accent).

The Nazism Glorification Contest is just getting underway, however, so a Roger Waters victory is by no means assured. John Cleese has reportedly broken out the classic “Basil Fawlty goose-step” and is giving old Rog a run for his money!

And, despite the fact that he’s currently running third, only a fool would count out Mel Brooks when it come to glorifying the Nazis and violating the dignity of the victims of the Holocaust!

But the most entertaining part of the Anti-Anti-Semitism Follies has been the histrionics of the shameless propagandists, politicians, media clowns, and random perpetually outraged persons who have been making total jackasses of themselves in their efforts to demonize Roger Waters. Here are a few examples, presented without comment.

Deborah E. Lipstadt, US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism.

Christian Wakeford, Labour MP.

StopAntisemitism, “an American non-profit watchdog organization” …

… and the “community note” Twitter readers appended.

Arsen Ostrovsky, CEO International Legal Forum.

Sergiy Kyslytsya, Permanent Representative of Ukraine to the United Nations.

And then there’s the corporate media propaganda.

And, finally, here’s a statement from Roger Waters.

OK, the part of all this that isn’t so uproariously funny, and that has forced me to spend a few hours on a Sunday banging out this column, when I should have been working on my science-denying conspiracy-theorist novel, or helping my wife install a set of blinds, is the part I have been going on and on about for the better part of the last seven years.

Despite all appearances to the contrary, the people demonizing Roger Waters are not idiots. They are liars. They know precisely what they are doing. They know Roger Waters is not an anti-Semite. They are aware of The Wall and his other work. They are not ignorant. They are propagandists. Smear artists. They are components of a decentralized, supranational network of global corporations, governments, banks, Intelligence agencies, military contractors, media, non-governmental governing entities, and so on, that I have been calling “GloboCap.” And the longer we continue to pretend they’re just idiots, the tighter their grip around our throats is going to get.

And, no, “GloboCap” is not code for “the Jews.” Global capitalism is global capitalism. If you seriously believe the multitudinous elements of global capitalism, and the banking industry, and the media, and the US military, and the Intelligence agencies of most Western countries, are controlled by “the Jews,” you are an actual anti-Semite, not to mention an actual moron.

And that’s the other part of this that isn’t so funny.

Yes, there are actual anti-Semites out there, and by throwing around false accusations of anti-Semitism, the global-capitalist ruling classes and their propagandists have rendered the term virtually meaningless, and, even worse than meaningless, they have made it a joke. Given the horrors of the Holocaust and the history of Nazi Germany, this was quite an accomplishment. Actual anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, and other slimy, bottom-feeding bigots could not be happier about this development. Watching as their opponents expose themselves as total hypocrites who will smear anyone as an “anti-Semite” at the drop of a hat and invoke “the dignity of the victims of the Holocaust” as a pretext to harass, and demonize, and censor, not just political activists and commentators, but musicians, authors, and other artists, and just regular non-public people on the Internet, is like Hitler’s birthday, the anniversary of Kristallnacht, and Nazi-Christmas all rolled into one.

Or, I don’t know, maybe that was the whole point. After all, the neo-Nazis are the good guys, right? I mean, as long as they are fighting the Russians for us, and not supporting those nasty Palestinians, or criticizing the State of Israel, or The Federal Republic of Germany, or global capitalism, or denying Covid, or “violating the dignity of its victims in a manner that disrupts public peace,” or … never mind. I think I’m getting confused and “relativizing the Holocaust” again, or “delegitimizing the state in a way that endangers security,” or something that might get the Germans after me.

Anyway, back to the Anti-Anti-Semitism Follies! I don’t know about you, but my money’s on Mel!

###

CJ Hopkins
May 28, 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.

Reality isn’t what it used to be. It never really was, but that’s another story. This one isn’t about reality per se. It’s about the War on Reality, the one we’re in the middle of, the war that started when the War on Terror was cancelled in the Summer of 2016. It’s actually an extension and an evolution of the War on Terror, and the War on Populism, and the rollout of the New Normal in 2020 … but that is also another story. I want to focus on the war that is raging currently, on the Internet, in people’s workplaces, homes, among friends and families, and in people’s heads. I’m pretty sure you know the war I’m talking about, regardless of which “side” you feel you are on.

The War on Reality is a civil war, but it is much more than just a civil war. It is an asymmetrical, polymorphous, metastatic, multiplicitous war. An ontological free-for-all. It has no conventions or rules of engagement. There are no battle lines. The battle is everywhere. Alliances shift from day to day. It is chaos, unrelenting, inescapable chaos. An omnipresent, immaterial, omnipotent organism attacking itself. It is continual, and completely unwinnable. It is unwinnable because it has already been won. It ended in victory the moment it began, and now we’re doomed to go on fighting it forever, or until some less ethereal leviathan is born, or reborn, out of its ashes.

Unfortunately, that’s rather likely, the less ethereal leviathan scenario. It may not come about in my lifetime — and, selfishly, I’m hoping it doesn’t — but this state of affairs cannot continue indefinitely. As I wrote in an essay in June of 2021 …

“The global capitalist ruling classes are implementing a new official ideology, in other words, a new ‘reality.’ That’s what an official ideology is. It’s more than just a set of beliefs. Anyone can have any beliefs they want. Your personal beliefs do not constitute ‘reality.’ In order to make your beliefs ‘reality,’ you need to have the power to impose them on society. You need the power of the police, the military, the media, scientific ‘experts,’ academia, the culture industry, the entire ideology-manufacturing machine. There is nothing subtle about this process. Decommissioning one ‘reality’ and replacing it with another is a brutal business. Societies grow accustomed to their ‘realities.’ We do not surrender them willingly or easily. Normally, what’s required to get us to do so is a crisis, a war, a state of emergency, or … you know, a deadly global pandemic. During the changeover from the old ‘reality’ to the new ‘reality,’ the society is torn apart. The old ‘reality’ is being disassembled and the new one has not yet taken its place. It feels like madness, and, in a way, it is. For a time, the society is split in two, as the two ‘realities’ battle it out for dominance. ‘Reality’ being what it is (i.e., monolithic), this is a fight to the death. In the end, only one ‘reality’ can prevail.”

I wrote that almost two years ago, in the relative calm before the storm of fascistic, hate-drunk mass hysteria and systematic official persecution that was unleashed on “the Unvaccinated” in the months that followed. If your memory of 2021 is hazy, my year-end column, The Year of the New Normal Fascist, or this video compilation by Matt Orfalea might help sharpen it back up. Since then, the madness of the reality-changeover in progress has intensified, albeit somewhat more subtly … or at least Keith Olbermann is not shrieking hatred like a meth-addled Goebbels.

GloboCap, Inc. and its innumerable subsidiaries, agents, assigns, political puppets, media goons, and other loyal minions are desperately endeavoring to enshrine the official Covid-19 narrative in the annals of “history.” According to new figures from the WHO, “almost 15 million excess deaths” (or “a total of 336.8 million lost life-years”) had been caused by the virus by the end of 2021, none of which had anything to do with ventilators, or the classification of anyone who died of anything (i.e., cancer, heart disease, an auto accident, etc.) who had also tested positive as a “Covid death.” Previously perfectly healthy young people are dropping dead left and right from heart attacks and other “natural” (or “undisclosed”) causes that have nothing to do with the experimental “vaccines” that they did not need but were coerced into taking, which saved millions or 100 million lives. The masks that didn’t work worked, except that they didn’t, but that was only if you studied how they worked in reality. Being locked down, forced to wear medical-looking masks, gaslighted and terrorized by official propaganda, bullied, segregated, censored, demonized, and otherwise systematically tortured, was actually good for people’s mental health, except for “people with existing mental health conditions, and children, and people with disabilities, and adolescents, and people without financial or social security nets.”

Meanwhile, cognitively dissonant New Normals are taking to the Internet to claim that no one knew better at the time, and that, OK, sure, “mistakes were made,” but if we “science-denying conspiracy theorists,” who they censored, demonized, and systematically persecuted for over two years, had just spoken up …

I could go on, but you get the picture … or, rather, you either do or you don’t. Because it’s not just the folks at GloboCap, Inc. that are fanatically waging this War on Reality. Everybody and their brother is trying to ram their “reality” down everyone’s throat. You got the “Viruses Do Not Exist” people. You got the “There Are No Neo-Nazis in Ukraine” people. The “Putin Is Our Savior” people. The Vote Blue Cult. The Multipolar people. The Transgendered People’s Army. The Doomsday Clock Hucksters. The Folks Who Still Listen to NPR. The Insurrection Truthers. The Insurrection Deniers. The 9/11 Truthers. The Moon-Landing Truthers. The Cult of Trump. The Church of Russiagate. The Rothschild Obsessives. The Anti-Racism Racists. The Anti-Anti-Semitism Anti-Semites. The Mass Formation Movement. The Cult of Marx. The Cult of Capital. The Climate Change Fanatics. The Musk Cult. The list goes on and on.

Historically, we humans have not done very well in such psychotic ontological environments. When “reality” is shattered into a thousand little shards, and things fall apart, and the center does not hold, we tend to get rather scared, and confused, and agitated. We start to panic. We try to put “reality” back together again. This does not work. This worsens our panic. We start looking around for a new “reality.” We start looking for a savior, a leader, a Führer, someone with a vision, and the will, and the power, to impose a new “reality” on the ontological chaos that is making us so confused and agitated, and scared, and angry, and restore some sense of ideological cohesion so that we don’t have to think about “reality” on a moment-by-moment basis anymore.

This is the time of dime-store messiahs, tinpot tyrants, zealots, gurus, hustlers, hosers, scam artists, quacks, snake oil salesmen of every variety, fanatical revolutionary movements, new religions and political parties, and so on. Typically, eventually, once the hapless masses have been repeatedly duped, and bilked, and betrayed, and gaslighted and humiliated to the point where they can’t even think anymore, literally cannot think because their brains are broken, and they just want someone to make it all stop … well, to rephrase an old Buddhist platitude, “when the masses are ready, the despot will appear.”

I think you know how this story ends.

The fascinating thing is, GloboCap, Inc. (i.e., global capitalism, corporatism, or whatever you need to call the supranational network of global corporations, governments, banks, military contractors, media and entertainment conglomerates, pharmaceutical behemoths, assorted oligarchs, non-governmental governing entities, etc., that are currently running the world) cannot afford to let that happen, and is tirelessly working to prevent that from happening.

Traditional (i.e., 20th Century) totalitarianism does not work for GloboCap, Inc. Capitalism, though it can adapt to anything, has never been inherently inclined toward fascism or any other form of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is a value-coding machine. Its objective is to completely code society with its values, its official ideology (i.e., “reality”). Every aspect of society, not just politics, culture, and so on, but the most intimate aspects of people’s lives.

Capitalism is a value-decoding machine. Its objective is to completely decode society of any values that impede the free flows of capital, rendering everything and everyone a de facto commodity, transforming societies into markets. It can adapt to totalitarianism and other varieties of despotism when necessary, but left to its own devices, or … you know, granted dominion over the entire Earth, and every creeping thing that creeps upon it, it sets about decoding and destabilizing values, destabilizing value and meaning itself, until, ultimately, everything means anything, or nothing, or whatever the market determines it means or is worth at any given moment.

The point is, the ongoing War on Reality is not a means to an end. It is the end. The official ideology (i.e., “reality”) that GloboCap, Inc. is implementing is not a set of official values or beliefs. It is the absence of any values or beliefs, any non-commodifiable values and beliefs. Values and beliefs are fine, as long as they’re just empty signs, logos, meaningless identity statements, and not principles and beliefs you are trying to live by, and that you are crazy enough to fight to preserve. Those kind of values have to go, so that the people of the New Normal future can be free to believe that war is peace, ignorance is strength, two plus two equals five, men have periods, Donald Trump is a Russian secret agent and literally Hitler, Vladimir Putin (who is also literally Hitler) invaded Ukraine for no reason whatsoever, or certainly not because of anything to do with GloboCap, Inc., or NATO, or the non-existent Ukrainian neo-Nazis, and then destroyed his own pipelines in the Baltic Sea, or whatever blatantly ridiculous nonsense they (i.e., the people of the New Normal future) are told to pretend or to actually believe by Rachel Maddow and the other talking heads you saw in Orfalea’s video.

And, if that doesn’t sound like your kind of future, or reality, the “everything is a floating signifier” reality … no worries, you can always drop out of the “mainstream” and join the carnival of “conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, Covid deniers, Russiagate deniers, climate change deniers, disinformationists, malinformationists, transphobes, white supremacists, violent domestic extremists,” and assorted other freaks and curiosities of nature that are actively being quarantined, or are quarantining themselves, in ideological ghettos where normal consumers never have to see them and they (i.e., we, the deviants and freaks) are preyed upon by legions of charlatans, demagogues, agents provocateurs, and other such spiritual and emotional parasites, until the day comes when we find ourselves spastically tweeting about an 86-year-old Chomsky chasing naked sex slaves around Epstein’s island, ripped to the gills on Viagra and Ecstasy, and probably freshly harvested adrenochrome!

That, or you could withdraw from society completely, and go live in a Kaczynski cabin in Montana, or Idaho, or wherever folks are doing that these days, as several of my readers advised me recently, and forage for berries, and barbecue squirrels, and, well, you know, defecate in a hole in the ground.

I’m sorry, I realize that all sounds pretty bleak. I guess I’m in a bleak mood these days, or running short on passionate intensity … or something. There’s no shortage of passionate intensity out there, if that’s what you are looking for. Don’t let me stop you. It’s just that, whenever I switch it off for a while, that passionate intensity, that howling maelstrom of warring realities, and listen closely, I hear the slouch of Yeats’s rough beast, whose hour, apparently, is coming round again.

I’m not sure which “side” it is slouching our way from, but probably that doesn’t matter.

Oh well … as the French say, plus ça change, and so on.

###

CJ Hopkins
May 22, 2023
Photo: Archive Films/Getty Images

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.

The following is an open letter to Ella G. Irwin, Head of Twitter Trust and Safety, and Elon Musk, CEO of Twitter, and anyone else at Twitter, Inc. who is responsible for censoring political speech and defaming people with fake “advisory” labels, among other such “visibility-filtering” tactics.

I am publishing it as an open letter, not to bore everyone to death with my personal problems, but because the censorship and defamation I have suffered at the hands of Twitter for at least two years is an example of how the decentralized network of global corporations, Intelligence agencies, governments, non-governmental governing entities, “anti-disinformation” outfits, and other parties that together comprise what Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi have dubbed the “Censorship Industrial Complex” are evolving into an Orwellian Ministry-of-Truth-type apparatus “with the power to control the information environment in ways that determine what people believe to be true and what is false.”

Twitter, Inc. has been censoring my political commentary and maliciously defaming me (i.e., damaging my reputation and income as an author) for approximately two years. Twitter has been doing this by concealing the Tweets of my “Consent Factory” account with fake “age-restricted adult content” labels, deceiving Twitter users into believing I have been tweeting content depicting “adult nudity and sexual behavior,” or “excessively gory content, sexual violence and/or assault, bestiality or necrophilia.” Twitter’s actions have damaged both my book sales and my reputation, globally. Defamation is a tort. I could sue the corporation for damages in several jurisdictions.

I have no interest in doing that, currently. What I do want, however, is a real explanation of why and exactly how Twitter, Inc. censored and defamed me for approximately two years. I want this explanation — a real explanation with documentation, not self-serving corporate-speak — not for personal reasons, primarily, but because I believe people need to be able to understand how powerful corporations like Twitter (and Facebook, and Google, and all the other entities and parties I mentioned above) are “visibility filtering” our collective reality.

The fact that these powerful corporations (and other entities) are doing this, not just on the macro level, but also on the micro level, to writers like me, who, let’s face it, are not exactly world-famous “influencers,” and to “non-public persons” who are basically just using social media to talk to their friends, does not bode well for the future of our societies. This kind of micro-perception-manipulation, this “visibility filtering” of our collective reality, goes way beyond traditional censorship. It is a hallmark of all totalitarian systems, which attempt to control, not only what people say, but what they think, how they think, how they perceive events, and facts, and each other.

Totalitarian systems do not spring into being fully formed. They develop slowly, gradually, unrecognized at first, and then ignored, usually until it is too late. We do not recognize the formation of new totalitarian systems because we are forever looking backwards instead of forwards, preparing for the storm that has passed, expecting history to repeat, rather than rhyme. Blinded by hindsight, we do not recognize the monster that is taking shape right in front of us. We glimpse a claw here, a tooth there, the flash of a pitiless blue eye, but fail to assemble the bits into an image of the beast entire, until it is inexorably upon us.

Anyway, here’s my open letter … one more bit, for the record.

To: Ella G. Irwin, Head of Trust and Safety, Twitter, Inc.
cc: Elon Musk

Dear Ms. Irwin,

This open letter is further to our brief correspondence on May 3, 2023 (on Twitter) regarding Twitter’s censorship and defamation of my @consent_factory Twitter account with fake “age-restricted adult content” labels for approximately two years.

First, thank you for taking action to cease and desist from further censorship and defamation. From what I can tell, it appears that Twitter is removing or has removed the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels from the @consent_factory Twitter account’s Tweets (or at least going back to late 2021). I trust that these fake “age-restricted adult content” labels will be removed from all of the account’s Tweets in due course, and I appreciate your prompt attention to this matter. Please accept my apology for claiming that you had lied about taking action on this. I admit, after two years of being censored and defamed, and having my complaints ignored by Twitter, I have become rather skeptical regarding your company’s behavior and statements. That said, it is clear now that you were not lying, and that you have taken action to have the fake, defamatory labels in question removed, and I apologize for publicly claiming otherwise.

Assuming the process is eventually completed and all of the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels that Twitter has been censoring the @consent_factory Twitter account with are in fact removed, I would appreciate substantive answers to the following questions:

(1) Why and exactly how did Twitter start censoring and defaming my Consent Factory account with these fake, defamatory “adult content” labels? When I asked you to explain that in our correspondence, you replied:

Clearly, the account did not “post multiple tweets containing sensitive content (nazi imagery) that resulted in the sensitive content label being applied,” because Twitter has now removed the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels from those Tweets, which contain the same “Nazi imagery” they originally contained. As I am sure you have noted, the so-called “Nazi imagery” contained in those Tweets was simply historical photos of the Nazi Germany era, which were used to illustrate critical points I was making in opposition to totalitarianism, and not at all any type of celebration or approval of totalitarianism or fascism. Any rational adult, seeing those Tweets, could not possibly mistake the anti-fascist/totalitarian intent behind them. Also, the fact that the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels are being removed gradually, in stages, rather than all at once, suggests that the application of the fake labels (or “interstitials”) in question was not the result of a blanket algorithm applied to the account. Additionally, not every Tweet (or every Tweet containing an image) by this account was censored with a fake “interstitial,” which suggests that something other than a blanket algorithm was at work.

In any event, having been censored and defamed for two years by Twitter, Inc., I think I am entitled to an actual explanation of how this started, including documentation of any intra-company discussions or “log” notes in connection with the decision to begin censoring and defaming the account. Your substantive response to this request will demonstrate that the “new” Twitter is, in fact, committed to transparency, and free speech, and not just another element of the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” as Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi dubbed it, before Mr. Musk cut off access to the “Twitter Files.”

(2) What, if any, other restrictions/visibility filtering tactics have been applied to my @consent_factory Twitter account from 2020 to the present? Again, I would appreciate documentation of any such “visibility filtering” or other “restrictions” and/or the removal thereof. Having been censored and maliciously defamed by Twitter for years, I believe I am entitled to know how my “visibility” is being and/or has been “filtered.”

(3) What steps is Twitter, Inc. now taking to cease and desist from the type of malicious defamation the company has been engaging in to suppress political speech and damage the reputation and income of writers, like me, and independent media outlets, like, for example, OffGuardian? Twitter blocks links to all OffGuardian articles with a different fake, defamatory “interstitial” warning.

There is nothing “unsafe” about OffGuardian, or any content published on the website that could possibly “lead to real-world harm.” It is a small, independent news and commentary outlet. Twitter, Inc. is using the fake “interstitial” warning above to discourage users from visiting the site, and thus damaging OffGuardian’s reputation and income. This is just one further example (i.e., in addition to my case). Twitter’s continued use of fake, defamatory, “interstitial” labels to suppress political views is relatively widespread, as far as I can tell. Moreover, recent updates to Twitter’s Platform Use Guidelines make it clear that Twitter intends to continue using these “interstitials,” which is worrying, given the fact that the company has been using them to deceive people, and to suppress political speech, and to damage the reputations and incomes of small businesses and sole proprietors.

That’s it for my questions, for now.

Again, thank you for finally putting an end to the defamation that Twitter, Inc. has been subjecting me to, for the last two years. I must say, it is a bit disappointing that it took a happenstance encounter on Twitter to connect with someone with the power to do that. Frankly, given Mr. Musk’s initial and ongoing publicity campaign to portray himself as a champion of free speech, and a stalwart opponent of censorship, and Twitter under his leadership as the antipode of “old, bad, censorship-happy Twitter,” I had expected that immediate steps would be taken to … you know, stop deceiving people, and maliciously defaming people, and manipulating the “visibility” of political views according to some unarticulated ideological schema, but I guess these things take time.

I look forward to your substantive response to the above questions.

Very truly yours,
C. J. Hopkins

P.S. Should you happen to run into Mr. Musk there at Twitter HQ, you might also want to suggest that he resume providing access to the “Twitter Files” to reporters like Matt and Michael Shellenberger, and Alex Gutentag (if I can put a word in for her). Doing so would demonstrate that the “Twitter Files” thing was not just a limited hangout, and a PR stunt designed to whitewash the company and kill public interest in the nefarious activities of Twitter, Inc., and other powerful global corporations, and their partners at the FBI, DHS, whatever that CIS or CISA acronym stands for, and … well, you know, “other agencies.”

###

CJ Hopkins
May 7, 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.