C.J. Hopkins's Blog, page 7

Robert Kennedy, Jr. is running for president. I could not possibly be more excited. So, I’m going to give Bobby some unsolicited advice, which, if he knows what’s good for him, he will not take.

I feel OK about doing this because, even if Bobby, in the wee hours of the night, when the mind is vulnerable to dangerous ideas, were to seriously consider taking my advice, I am sure he has people — i.e., PR people, campaign strategists, pollsters, and so on — that would not hesitate to take him aside and disabuse him of any inclination to do that.

OK, before I give Bobby this terrible advice, I have to do the “full disclosure” thing. I’m a pretty big fan of RFK, Jr. I don’t generally get involved in electoral politics, but, if I were a Democrat, I would definitely vote for him. Also, he was kind enough to blurb my book (which isn’t going to make his PR people happy) and invite me onto his podcast, RFK, Jr. The Defender, to talk about “New Normal” totalitarianism. So, I am fairly biased in favor of Bobby Kennedy. I think he is an admirable, honorable human being. I would love to see him in the Oval Office.

That isn’t going to happen, of course. The global-capitalist ruling classes are never going to let him near the Oval Office. They learned their lesson back in 2016. There are not going to be any more unauthorized presidents. The folks at GloboCap are done playing grab-ass, and they want us to know that they are done playing grab-ass. That’s what the last six years have been about.

As I put it in a column in January, 2021 …

“… This, basically, is what we’ve just experienced. The global capitalist ruling classes have just reminded us who is really in charge, who the US military answers to, and how quickly they can strip away the facade of democracy and the rule of law. They have reminded us of this for the last ten months, by putting us under house arrest, beating and arresting us for not following orders, for not wearing masks, for taking walks without permission, for having the audacity to protest their decrees, for challenging their official propaganda, about the virus, the election results, etc. They are reminding us currently by censoring dissent, and deplatforming anyone they deem a threat to their official narratives and ideology … GloboCap is teaching us a lesson. I don’t know how much clearer they could make it. They just installed a new puppet president, who can’t even simulate mental acuity, in a locked-down, military-guarded ceremony which no one was allowed to attend, except a few members of the ruling classes. They got some epigone of Albert Speer to convert the Mall (where the public normally gathers) into a ‘field of flags‘ symbolizing ‘unity.’ They even did the Nazi ‘Lichtdom‘ thing. To hammer the point home, they got Lady Gaga to dress up as a Hunger Games character with a ‘Mockingjay’ brooch and sing the National Anthem. They broadcast this spectacle to the entire world.”

Does that sound like the behavior of an unaccountable, supranational power apparatus that is prepared to stand by and let Bobby Kennedy, Jr., or Donald Trump, or any other unauthorized person, become the next president of the United States?

So, here’s my bad advice for Bobby.

Fuck them. They’re not going to let you win, anyway. They are going to smear you, slime you, demonize you, distort every other thing you say, and just generally lie about who you are and what you believe in and what you stand for. They are going to paint you as a bull-goose-loony, formerly smack-addled, conspiracy-theorizing, anti-vax fanatic no matter what you do. If you tone down your act and try to “heal the divide” and “end the division,” they are going to have you for lunch, and then sit around picking their teeth with your bones. You know, and I know, and the American people know, that the things you say you want to do as president — which I know you sincerely want to do as president and are crazy enough to actually try to do, i.e., “to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism in our country” — are things … well, as Michael Corleone once put it, that they would “use all their power to keep from happening.”

So, fuck it, and fuck them. Tell the truth.

Not the ready-for-prime-time truth. Not the toned-down-for-mainstream-consumption truth. The truth. The ugly, unvarnished truth. The scary, crazy-sounding truth. The angry, divisive, uncensored truth.

Yes, there is a “divide.” A great divide. A chasm. A schism. A gulf. An abyss. A gaping, yawning, unbridgeable fissure. A Grand Canyon-sized fault in the foundation of society. A rupture in the very fabric of reality.

As I noted in another 2021 column, the global-capitalist ruling classes have decommissioned one “reality” and are replacing it with another “reality” … corporate feudalism, pathologized totalitarianism, global corporatism, or whatever anybody wants to call it. Whatever we call it, everyone feels it. OK, I’m going to be obnoxious and quote myself again …

“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.”

The folks at GloboCap are right on the verge of permanently implementing their new “reality.” In that “reality,” an apocalyptic virus (with a survival rate of roughly 99.7%) nearly wiped out the entire planet, and would have, if not for the Emergency Health Measures (i.e., mass house arrest, forced conformity rituals, cancellation of constitutional rights, censorship of dissent, official propaganda on a scale that even Goebbels could never have dreamed of, fomenting of mass hysteria and hatred, segregation and persecution of a designated scapegoat underclass) imposed on society by our admittedly imperfect but well-intentioned government and global health authorities. In that “reality,” the “vaccines” they forced on billions of people (who did not need them) are “safe and effective” (despite the fact, which even they now acknowledge, that they have seriously injured or killed millions of people). In that “reality,” a few hundred unarmed Trump supporters horsing around in the Capitol Building was an “insurrection,” or “attempted coup,” or … well, you get the picture. There are no neo-Nazis in the Ukraine. The Russians blew up their own pipelines. And so on.

What I am trying to get at, Bobby, is that those of us who have refused to convert to the new “reality” — which I am guessing is approximately 25-30% of the global population — are not looking for a leader who can “heal the divide.” We are in a fight. We are fighting for reality. We’re fighting for what’s left of reality.

And, at the moment, we are getting our asses kicked.

So, fuck it. What have you got to lose? Throw out the playbook. Fire your PR people. Go for broke. Tell the truth. Tell folks what we’re up against. That it isn’t something an election is going to fix. That it isn’t something a new president can fix. That it isn’t fixable. That it is a fucking fight. And not one according to the Queensberry Rules. A ball-kicking, eye-gouging, chair-swinging, bar fight. And that sometimes, like now, when there is nowhere to run to … well, you have to stand and fight, even if you know you’re going to lose.

That’s it. That’s my bad advice for Bobby. Hopefully, one of his staff will spot it and delete it before he reads his email. Otherwise, I’m afraid he might be tempted to take it. He’s already leaning in that direction. And … well, you know how those Irish love a good fight.

###

CJ Hopkins
April 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.

And so the “Twitter Files” Limited Hangout has come to its inevitable, ignominious end. It is over. The Twitter-Files story is dead. It isn’t pining for the fjords. It is deceased, cadaverous, bereft of life. It has bought the farm and gone to meet its maker. It is Humpty Dumpty. It has fallen off the wall. Nothing can put it back together again.

I have to tip my hat to Elon Musk. It was quite an impressive limited hangout. The way Musk took the potential story of a global network of Intelligence agencies, corporations, NGOs, and assorted “disinformation experts” censoring, visibility-filtering, and otherwise neutralizing dissent as GloboCap executed the “shock-an-awe” phase of the roll-out of the “New Normal” over the last three years … the way Musk took that potentially game-changing story by the throat and throttled it, played around with its corpse for a while like a cat, and then finally threw it down, squatted over it, and obstreperously, definitively defecated on it, that was … well, quite impressive.

If you missed the final twists and turns in the Twitter-Files story (R.I.P), Matt Taibbi, who is currently attempting to enjoy a vacation at Disneyland with the wife and kids, published an update on Racket News, his “Twitter-killing” Substack newsletter covering the juicy bits.

Here’s the “money” paragraph, or most of it …

“In doing all this Elon immolated the last remnants of any reputation he had as a free speech advocate and gave immeasurable succor to the assorted David Brocks, AOCs, and Renee DiRestas who view him as an antichrist. All can now point to his outbursts of cartoon censorship and argue individual eccentric CEOs are the real danger to free expression, not squads of executives working in oligopolistic secrecy with the FBI, DHS, and ten million Pentagon-funded Centers for Securing Whatever. It won’t be true, but Elon’s public meltdown will in the short run take a ton of pressure off these villains, while accelerating the piranha frenzy currently skeletonizing Twitter’s profits …”

What Matt can’t quite say (and I understand why) is that Elon’s meltdown will not just “give immeasurable succor” to the David Brocks, AOCs, and other functionaries and puppets who have demonized him, and “take a ton of pressure off these villains,” it will effectively kill the future of the story, and consign what has been reported so far to the “lunatic fringes” of the Internet, where no one “normal” will ever be forced to pay it any serious attention again.

That, my friends, is called a limited hangout. As I explained in my column in January …

“The way a limited hangout works is, if you’re an intelligence agency, or a global corporation, or a government, or a non-governmental organization, and you have been doing things you need to hide from the public, and those things are starting to come to light such that you can’t just deny that you are doing them anymore, what you do is, you release a limited part of the story (i.e., the story of whatever it is you’re doing) to distract people’s attention from the rest of the story. The part you release is the ‘limited hangout.’ It’s not a lie. It’s just not the whole story. You ‘hang it out’ so that it will become the whole story, and thus stop people from pursuing the whole story.”

I was besieged by irate Elon-worshippers, and “unfollowed,” “unfriended,” “unsubscribed to,” and so on, for days and weeks after I published that column. Perhaps a few of them will get it now. The point is, it is over … that was it. There are not going to be any “Covid Twitter Files.” There aren’t going to be any “Nuremberg trials.” The Censorship Industrial Complex is not going anywhere. It is here to stay.

From now on, any further Twitter Files reporting — any actual reporting on the Censorship Industrial Complex at all — will be summarily dismissed as another episode of Elon’s Flying Narcissistic Circus. There will be no more congressional hearings. Anyone who continues to cover the story (i.e., the actual story, not the Twitter Files) will be branded a minion of Elon Musk, “a right-wing extremist conspiracy theorist,” no more serious than a “9/11 truther.”

Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and less famous journalists like Jacob Siegel, who in a rational world would receive awards for their work, will be systematically, ritually, spat on. Others will simply be ignored. Mehdi Hasan and other hatchet men will parade around with permanent hard-ons spewing vitriol at anyone who even broaches the subject (i.e., the TV hatchet men will spew, not their hard-ons).

Interest in the story will precipitously decline.

Apparently, Musk’s interest is already declining, and he is eager to “move on to the future.”

Of course he is. His work is done.

Now, before anyone gets all jacked up and starts calling me a “conspiracy theorist,” I don’t believe any of this was intentional, or at least not a conscious plan on Musk’s part — I’m not quite that gibberingly paranoid — but, if the Censorship Industrial Complex, or GloboCap (or whatever you need to call the multiplicitous, supranational network of governments, global corporations, NGOs, Intelligence agencies, oligarchs, media, and other such entities that are radically, aggressively restructuring “reality” in a distinctly totalitarian fashion) … if those folks (or that ideological system) wanted to execute an elaborate limited hangout and immunize themselves against any further exposure of their Orwellian schemes to eliminate dissent and gaslight the masses, they could not possibly have done a better job than Musk.

Oh, and one more thing, and this is for you Musk fans.

Make sure to keep cheering for Elon to keep putting those hilarious affiliation labels on the Twitter accounts of the BBC, NPR, and all those other official propaganda outlets, instead of, you know, just getting rid of all the labels. With any luck, one day soon, we will wake up in a brave, new world where global corporations put labels (or warnings) on us all.

I have a hunch what mine might look like …

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CJ Hopkins
April 13, 2023

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

So, I went to London to speak to the Left … no, not “the Left” you’re probably thinking of. Not the mask-wearing, Ukrainian-flag-flying Left. Not the pronoun-using, segregationist Left. Not the WEF, WHO, FBI, CIA, DHS, and MI6-loving Left. Not the global-capitalist New Normal Left. The other Left. The old-school Left. The “Covid-denying, conspiracy-theorizing, Putin-loving, far-right-extremist” Left.

There were approximately 150 of us, and we gathered in a “homophobic church” in Islington. Yes, Islington, which is more or less the British headquarters of the New Normal Left. We did not care. “Let them come for us,” we said. They didn’t. It was a Saturday. They were probably out shopping or hunting down imaginary anti-Semites. So, we went ahead and did our thing.

Our “thing” was a conference loosely based on leftist opposition to the WEF and its assorted dystopian visions for our future … you know, eating the bugs, owning nothing, being happy, that kind of stuff. I was invited by this group called Real Left to speak on a panel with Fabio Vighi, a professor of Critical Theory at Cardiff University. We didn’t talk about the WEF very much. We mostly talked about global capitalism, totalitarianism, and “the New Normal Left.”

Here are the broad strokes of what I said the conference.

…

In order to understand what happened to the Left (i.e., how it became the New Normal Left), you have to understand the history of global capitalism over the last 30 years or so. Actually, you have to go back a bit farther, back to the early 20th Century, when the Great Ideological Game was still afoot. Back then, capitalism, having overthrown the aristocracies, was on the march, transforming the world into one big marketplace. It was challenged by two opposing ideologies, fascism and communism. They fought it out. Long story short, capitalism won.

Global capitalism (“GloboCap”) was born. It’s one big global-capitalist world now. It has been since the early 1990s. GloboCap has no external adversaries, so it has nothing to do but Clear and Hold, i.e., wipe out pockets of internal resistance and implement ideological uniformity. Which is what it has been doing for the last 30 years, first, in the former Soviet bloc, then, in “The Global War on Terror,” and finally, in our so-called “Western democracies,” as we have just experienced up close and personal during the shock-and-awe phase of the rollout of the New Normal, and are continuing to experience, albeit somewhat less dramatically.

In other words, GloboCap is going totalitarian. That is what the New Normal is. It is not your granddad’s totalitarianism. It is a new, global-capitalist form of totalitarianism. It displays a number of familiar features — suspension of constitutional rights, official propaganda, goon squads, censorship, ubiquitous symbols of ideological conformity, gratuitous restrictions of freedom of movement and other aspects of everyday life, hatred and persecution of official “Untermenschen,” segregation, criminalization of dissent, mob violence, book burning, show trials, etc. — but there won’t be anyone goose-stepping around in jackboots shrieking about “the master race.” It’s not that kind of totalitarianism.

To understand it (which it would behoove us to do), we need to understand global-capitalist ideology, which isn’t as easy as it sounds. Global capitalism has no ideology … or, rather, its ideology is “reality.” When you have no ideological adversaries, you don’t need an ideology. You’re basically God. “Reality” is whatever you say it is, and whoever disagrees is a “science denier,” or a “conspiracy theorist,” or a “malinformationist,” or some other type of deluded “extremist.” You don’t need to argue ideology with anyone, because you have no ideological opponents. Society is divided into two fundamental groups, (a) “normal people,” who accept “reality,” and (b) the “deviants” and “extremists,” who do not. Your political and ideological opponents are pathologized, preemptively delegitimized. After all, who would argue against “reality” except liars and the clinically insane?

Yes, of course, there is intramural political and ideological conflict within the confines of so-called “normality,” just as there is intramural competition between global corporations, but challenging the ideological system itself is impossible, because there is no ground outside it from which to mount an attack. This is probably the hardest thing for most of us to come to terms with. There is no ideological territory outside global capitalism. There is no “outside.” There are no external adversaries. There are only insurgencies, and counterinsurgency ops.

The rest is intramural competition.

And here’s another thing that we need to understand about global-capitalist ideology, and it isn’t going to make my conservative readers, or my libertarian readers, or my leftist readers, happy. But it is essential to understanding the New Normal Left and the shape of the current ideological landscape. I’m going to try to keep this as simple as possible and not get lost in a bunch of post-structuralist mumbo jumbo.

Ready? OK, here we go.

Capitalism is a values-decoding machine. It decodes society of despotic values (i.e., religious values, racist values, socialist values, traditional values, any and all values that interfere with the unimpeded flows of capital … capitalism does not distinguish). This is how capitalism (or democracy if you’re squeamish) freed us from a despotic “reality” in which values emanated from the aristocracies, kings, priests, the Church, etc. Basically, it transferred the emanation and enforcement of values from despotic structures to the marketplace, where everything is essentially a commodity.

So, hurrah … capitalism freed us from despotism! I’m grateful. I’m not a big fan of despotism. The problem is, it’s just a machine. And it has no off-switch. And now it dominates the entire planet unopposed or restricted in any meaningful way. So it’s doing what it is designed to do, stripping societies of their despotic values, rendering everything and everyone a commodity, establishing and enforcing ideological uniformity, neutralizing pockets of internal resistance.

The vast majority of that resistance is reactionary. I do not mean that in the pejorative sense. Most of the opposition to the New Normal has come from the traditional political right, from folks who are trying to preserve their values, i.e., to prevent them from being decoded by the GloboCap values-decoding machine. A lot of these folks don’t see it that way, because they do not want to face the fact that what they are resisting is global capitalism, so they call it other names like “crony capitalism,” “corporatism,” or “cultural Marxism.” I don’t really care what they call it, except when they call it “communism,” which just makes them sounds extremely silly.

The point is, these folks comprise a reactionary force that is pushing back against the advance of global-capitalism and its ideology, whether they know what they are resisting or not. Russia is another such reactionary force, at least insofar as it is attempting to defend what remains of its national sovereignty. Syria and Iran are two other examples. All of these reactionary forces are integrated within the GloboCap system and at the same time are resisting their absorption by it. The dynamics are complex. It isn’t a cartoon or a Hollywood movie with “good guys” and “bad guys.”

Anyway, the battlefield looks like this … you’ve got GloboCap conducting its Clear-and-Hold op, and you’ve got the reactionary (“populist”) backlash against it. And that’s it. Those are the only significant forces on the battlefield, currently.

Which brings us to the miserable state of the Left.

The Left — and I mean “the Left” broadly, so liberals, and both serious and Brooklyn leftists — are in an ideological double-bind. Either they align with an increasingly totalitarian GloboCap or they align with the reactionary backlash against it.

They can’t align with the reactionaries, because a lot of them are … well, you know, somewhat bigoted, or they believe in God, or they object to drag queens rubbing themselves all over kids. Many of them own multiple firearms (i.e., the reactionaries, not the drag queens) and fly giant American flags outside their homes (or whatever flags they fly in Great Britain). Many of them voted for Donald Trump, or Brexit, or the AfD here in Germany, or the National Rally in France, or The Brothers of Italy. These are not BBC/NPR-listening people. These are not pronoun-using people. These are scary working-class people.

So the Left has aligned with GloboCap, which, after all, is still decoding all those nasty despotic values (i.e., racism, and other forms of bigotry), and is opposing dictators and religious zealots, and is spreading “democracy” all across the planet. You might think I am being facetious. I am not. Global capitalism is still doing that. Which I support, as do all liberals and leftists.

The catch is, as global capitalism continues to do that, and makes a big show of doing that, it is also going totalitarian. It is not decoding those despotic values out of the goodness of its heart. What it is doing is establishing ideological uniformity. The problem is, it has no ideology. All it knows how to do is decode values, transforming societies into markets and everything in them into valueless commodities. Which it is doing in totalitarian fashion. The Nazis referred to this process as “Gleichschaltung,” the synchronization of all elements of society according to official ideology. That is what is happening, currently, globally.

GloboCap has begun the transition from a “reality” of competing ideologies, sovereign nation-states, cultures, and values to a new, supranational, post-ideological, eventually trans-human, globalized “reality,” and the message is, “you are either with us or against us.”

The New Normal Left is obviously with GloboCap. New Normal Leftists will furiously deny this, as they shriek for more censorship of dissent and cheer for actual Sieg-heiling Nazis. Just as the “populist” Right cannot accept the fact that what it is opposing is a form of capitalism, the New Normal Left cannot accept the fact that it is aligned with a new form of totalitarianism. It is literally inconceivable to them. You can show them screenshots of their posts and Tweets in which they called for “the Unvaccinated” to be locked up in camps, and pictures of when they formed fanatical mobs and threatened people who wouldn’t chant their slogans, and they will look at you as if you are out of your mind.

…

And so we are in a bit of a fix. Which is basically what I told the conference in London. I wish I had some brilliant plan of action to offer. Sadly, I do not. Probably no one does at this stage of things. After all, the New Normal is just getting started.

That said, one thing I’m sure about is, if you don’t want to end up eating the bugs and owning nothing and being happy in your AI-monitored 15-minute city while you wait for your social-credit app to update your vaccination record so you can access your CBDC account and make another minimum payment on your ever-deepening credit-card debt, it would probably be a good idea to try to understand what is actually happening.

Or maybe not. What do I know? I’m just an old “far-right extremist lefty.”

###

CJ Hopkins
April 3, 2023
Photo: Kunkel/Washington Post

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

I think something is seriously wrong with my brain. Yesterday, I hallucinated that Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before a subcommittee of the US House of Representatives about the Censorship Industrial Complex, i.e., the US arm of the global official propaganda and disinformation apparatus that has been waging an all-out war on dissent for the better part of the last six years.

I know this couldn’t have actually happened, and was just an extended hallucination (probably the result of the copious amount of drugs I consumed in my misspent youth, or the effects of a Commie bio-weapon with a fatality rate of less than one percent, because I’ve been writing about The War on Dissent (2018), and The Criminalization of Dissent (2021), and the global Corporate COINTELPRO op (2017), and The War on Reality (2021), and The Manufacturing of Reality (2021), and Manufacturing Truth (2018), and Manufacturing Normality (2016), and The Road to Totalitarianism (2022), and The Gaslighting of the Masses (2022) … well, for quite some time. So, I’m sure it was just an hallucination, because there’s no way Matt and Shellenberger were actually sitting there talking about how …

“We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.” (Matt Taibbi’s Statement to Congress)

… and documenting the coordinated censorship of sources that interfered with certain official narratives, like “Russiagate” and “The Apocalpytic Virus” …

… because that’s just a crazy “conspiracy theory.”

I am also sure I was hallucinating yesterday, because, right in the middle of my hallucination, right around the time that Stacey Plaskett started squawking like a demon pterodactyl, I had another hallucination, like my hallucinating self was hallucinating, which was like being in a Christopher Nolan film. In this one, Matt asked me to talk about how I was being censored by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al., and their governmental and NGO partners in 2021, and I started babbling all this “conspiracy theory” stuff about the very “Censorship-Industrial-Complex” that Matt and Shellenberger were testifying about in the hallucination I appeared to be hallucinating the other hallucination in.

And then my hallucination got weird.

Now, it’s been quite a while since I’ve indulged in any seriously mind-bending drugs, but this reminded me of a bad LSD trip, like when Satan starts talking to you through the TV. There I was, happily hallucinating these two distinguished independent journalists who had done all this historic reporting on a story of extreme importance and had been invited to Congress to talk about it, and, suddenly, it all went dark and twisted.

Stacey Plaskett, the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary subcommittee started badgering, insulting, smearing, and baiting Matt and Shellenberger like Joe McCarthy in drag. Trembling with hatred, she accused them of being members of some sort of Substack-based death squad that “poses a direct threat to people who oppose them,” and of stochastically terrorizing Yoel Roth, the former Twitter Censorship Czar, and of unleashing “homophobia and anti-Semitism” on him. Then she launched into a spittle-flecked rant about “January 6” and “threatening our democracy,” until she was restrained by James Jordan, the Subcommittee Chairman. And this was just during her opening remarks.

The other Democrats soon joined in the bullying, and lying, and smearing, and sneering, and generally acting like prosecutors at some hate-drunk witch trial. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who, for whatever reasons, is still allowed to serve in Congress after being forced to resign as the DNC Chair for rigging the 2016 election, staged a whole dog-and-pony show with blow-up photos of Joe Rogan and so on. Sylvia Garcia, who appeared to be drunk, demanded that Matt reveal his source, and then, when he refused, repeatedly tried to weasel it out of him with all the deftness of a one-legged idiot in an ass-kicking contest. Colin Allred put on a PowerPoint show involving Kanye West’s anti-Semitic tweets, random bigots on Twitter, and the Russian agents who conspired against him (i.e., Allred) personally, and then lectured Matt about the “threats to our democracy” and called him a “conspiracy theorist.” Stephen Lynch went full-McCarthy, demanding that the witnesses affirm they “believe that Russians interfered in the 2016 election.”

And so on. I told you things got twisted. Thank God it was just an hallucination and not a live, televised demonstration of precisely what I have been trying to describe the emergence of for the last six years, which is a new totalitarian form of global capitalism that no longer needs to maintain the pretense of upholding (or respecting) our “democratic rights,” because it has no external adversaries, and thus is free to morph into a quasi-Orwellian dystopia where any and all forms of dissent from official ideology can (and must) be delegitimized as “disinformation,” “misinformation, and even “malinformation,” and corporate-owned political puppets feel no compunction whatsoever about behaving like vicious little fascists on television because they know they have the fearsome power of the global-capitalist machine behind them, no matter how openly (and badly) they lie, and that their fanatical followers will parrot any propaganda they are given to parrot, no matter how patently false or absurd, and will spew their mindless hatred at whomever they are ordered to spew it at, and otherwise act like a bunch of fascists.

Anyway, thank God that was just a bad flashback, or a minor cerebral infarction, or whatever, because, if it wasn’t … what a total bummer!

OK, seriously now, I assume that some of my regular readers might be confused by this essay. After all, I have been rather critical of Elon Musk and his handling of the “Twitter Files.” And now, here I am, celebrating Matt and Shellenberger’s testimony yesterday. Did I not call the Twitter Files a limited hangout? Yes, I did. And I will do it again. But not today. Today I will celebrate. I will raise a glass to Matt and Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, and the other Twitter Files journalists. I will even raise a glass to Elon Musk (who continues to maliciously defame and censor me and others like me with fake “content warnings” and other such slimy censorship tactics) for making the Twitter Files available to them.

If that baffles you … well, let me tell you a secret.

The way this little ecosystem works is, writers like me don’t get to testify on television before subcommittees. Actual journalists get to do that. Actual journalists who are “normal” enough. Actual journalists like Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Glenn Greenwald, et al. You know who I’m talking about. Actual journalists who know where the lines are, who aren’t going to start babbling about “Pathologized Totalitarianism” and “The New Normal Reich” on national television. What writers like me do get to do (and what it is our job to do) is subtly influence, gently pressure, and pester the living hell out of actual journalists who still have a shred of integrity left by saying the things they cannot say, or saying them in a way that they cannot say them, until the time comes when they can almost say them, because we have said them over and over again, and more or less everyone can see them, so it is finally safe to say them, almost.

OK, sure, it doesn’t pay all that much, but it’s fun, and I tend to sleep fairly well.

So, don’t worry, I’ll get back to doing that shortly. The “Censorship-Industrial-Complex” is a much bigger story than just the US division. I’ll be prodding Matt and the other Twitter Files journalists to prod Elon Musk to bring in international journalists to cover the same story in countries like Germany, the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Italy, The Netherlands, and so on. Feel free to join in the fun. Who knows? In another four or five years, we might even find out how this photo simultaneously appeared in every paper of record on the planet in January of 2020 … that is, if we’re not all locked away in “conspiracy theorist” camps by then.

In the meantime, kudos to the Twitter Files Team!

###

CJ Hopkins
March 10, 2023
Photos: The House of Representatives Judiciary Committee; The New York Times

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, here’s a “conspiracy theory” for you. This one is about the global-capitalist thoughtpolice and their ongoing efforts to purge society of “insensitivity.” Yes, that’s right, insensitivity. If there is anything the global-capitalist thoughtpolice can’t stand, it is insensitivity. You know, like making fun of ethnic or religious minorities, and the physically or cognitively challenged, and alternatively gendered persons, and hideously ugly persons, and monstrously fat persons, and midgets, and so on.

The global-capitalist thoughtpolice are terribly concerned about the feelings of such persons. And the feelings of other sensitive persons who are also concerned about the feelings of such persons. And everybody’s feelings, generally. So they’re purging society of any and all forms of literary content, and every other form of content, that might possibly irreparably offend such persons, and persons concerned about the feelings of such persons, and anyone who might feel offended by anything.

By now, I assume you have seen the news about the “sensitivity editing” of Roald Dahl, the author of books like James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Witches, The Twits, and numerous others. What happened was, Dahl’s publisher, Puffin Books, hired a little clutch of “sensitivity editors” to substantively rewrite his books, purging words like “fat” and “ugly,” and Dahl’s descriptions of characters as “bald” and “female,” and inserting their own ham-handed, “sensitized” language.

What you may not be aware of is that Puffin Books is a children’s imprint of Penguin Random House, a multi-national conglomerate publishing company and a subsidiary of Bertelsmann, a nominally German but in reality global media conglomerate. Penguin Random House is one of the so-called “big five publishers” that control approximately 80% of the retail book market. The other four are Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette, and HarperCollins.

Together, these five corporate behemoths, with their hundreds of divisions, publishing groups, and imprints (e.g., Puffin Books), control the majority of what everyone reads. Pull a few books off your bookshelves at random and look up the imprints to see how many are owned by one of the “big five” publishers or one of their divisions or publishing groups.

Another thing you may not be aware of is the increasing employment of “sensitivity readers” by these publishing conglomerates and their legions of imprints, and by writers aspiring to be published by these imprints. Writer’s Digest describes their function thus:

“Publishers and authors hire them to basically cancel-proof their books before they hit the street, hoping to head off any misspoken messages . . . hoping to depict peoples in an accurate light when it comes to genre, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and more. Sensitivity edits are a publisher’s or editor’s insurance to protect reputation and ward off profit loss, just in case, and an author’s attempt to depict characters in an accurate light. Entities purchase a sensitivity read when the writing is outside of their expertise or experience, or they are uncertain they depicted details properly.”

Penguin Random House recommends “authenticity readers” to any of its authors who are “writing outside their personal experience” (i.e., using their imaginations), to prevent them from “perpetuating stereotypes,” or exhibiting their “unconscious or internalized bias” and creating “patterns of harmful representation,” and so on.

If this sounds to you like some kind of creepy, Orwellian-Ministry-of-Truth-type mindfuckery, that’s because that’s exactly what it is. It doesn’t really affect old farts like me — I wouldn’t let any of the big corporate publishers or their “sensitivity readers” near my writing, which they would never publish in any event, and which would likely cause them to experience seizures, and then stagger around the office looking for differently-abled-Black-transgender colleagues to kneel down in front of and apologize to — but there’s a whole generation of aspiring writers who are being conditioned to accept this as “normal.”

The Roald-Dahl story is being framed as a “woke/anti-woke” culture-war story. It isn’t. And it isn’t an aberration. It’s part and parcel of the new global-capitalist totalitarianism that I’ve been going on and on about. The entire “Wokeness” phenomenon is. Global-capitalist cultural revolutionaries are hunting down “insensitivity” everywhere. In the arts, schools, TV shows, films, social media, et cetera. “Insensitivity” being any and all forms of deviation from global-capitalist ideology, regardless of where they fall on the left/right spectrum. I have described the process as a new form of Gleichschaltung, the systematic coordination of every element of society — or every element that matters — in conformity with global-capitalist ideology.

So, what is global-capitalist ideology?

Well, I told you I had a “conspiracy theory” for you. It is not a very sexy “conspiracy theory,” but it’ll have to do, because it’s all I’ve got. And, forgive me, but I’m just getting started on my second “insensitive” dystopian novel, so I’m going to explain this “conspiracy theory” with a lengthy excerpt from the introduction to The War on Populism: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. II (2018-2019), one of my collections of essays, rather than taking the time to reword it badly. It really is a rather lengthy excerpt, so, if you happen to be reading this at work (i.e., when you are supposed to be working), or if you need to get back to a Twitter-fracas, or if you have the attention span of a gnat, you might want to save it and try to read it later.

Ready? OK, here we go.

‘This conflict (i.e., global capitalism versus a global “populist” insurgency) is at the root of all the madness of the last four years. To understand it, one needs to understand that it is primarily an ideological conflict, a global war for hearts and minds. Trump, Johnson, Corbyn, Sanders, and other so-called “populist” figures, were never a real threat to GloboCap, not in any material sense. They are symbols, figureheads, representations of resistance to global capitalist ideology. It is this resistance to its ideology (from both the left and the right … it makes no difference), more than any particular political leader or movement, that GloboCap has been trying to crush. It needs to put down this “populist” insurgency, so it can get on with the business of transforming the entire world into one big value-less marketplace … which is what it has been doing for last thirty years.

This is what capitalism was built to do. Ideologically speaking, it is a simple machine, one that strips societies of “despotic” values (e.g., religious, social, cultural values … values established by kings, priests, aristocracies, artists, communities, political parties, families, et cetera) and replaces them all with a single value (i.e., exchange value), rendering everything a commodity. In essence, it is an ideological machine, a values-decoding/recoding machine, which transforms societies into markets.

(I’ve cut a bit here, to make it somewhat less lengthy and get to the global-capitalist ideology part.)

Global capitalism’s ideology (i.e., the territory that comprises our “reality”) is unlike any other ideology in the 5,000-year history of ideology. It is an ideological territory without limits, neither internal nor external boundaries. It is a featureless territory, in which anything is possible, because nothing within it has any value, or meaning, in and of itself. It is literally a “desert of the real,” an infinite, seamless desert of values, across the lifeless surface of which the ghosts of values eternally wander, in circles, aimlessly, signifying nothing, going nowhere, for they are already there, in the only place there is to be, because the desert is everywhere, and everything.

There is nowhere and nothing outside of this territory. There is no “outside” where anything could exist. It is one big global capitalist world, one unitary, omnipresent, capitalist “reality” … one big global marketplace, or it will be, once GloboCap finishes destabilizing and restructuring what remains of the post-Cold-War world.

This is the story of the last thirty years. Beneath the distractions of the day, the manufactured mass hysteria, the propaganda, the fabricated outrage, the scandals, the wars, rumors of wars, the deafening roar of millions of voices shrieking gibberish on social media, conspiracy theories, real and imagined, the cheap charade of electoral politics, and so on, right out there in the open, because no one has been paying much attention, GloboCap has been mopping up, cleansing societies of their outmoded values, absorbing them into the global market … implementing ideological conformity.

You’re familiar with this ideological conformity. We all are. You’re probably in favor of many of the “values” it purports to want to promote, anti-racism, equal rights, separation of church and state, et cetera, the traditional liberal agenda. Remember, capitalist ideology is what finally freed us from the rule of despots, kings, aristocracies, priests. (Personally, I’m extremely grateful for that.) As I explained above, capitalism did this by eradicating “despotic” values and replacing them all with a single value, exchange value, rendering everything a commodity. That doesn’t sound very appealing, however. No one wants to see themselves as just a commodity, or live in a world without any real values. So capitalism marketed itself as “democracy,” and that went over much better with the masses.

Here we are, a few hundred years later, and “democracy” (i.e., capitalism) is running out of “despotic” values to eradicate and “liberate” us from. Sure, it still has some work to do secularizing the Middle East, and there are still a few countries that aren’t playing ball, but most of the planet has gotten with the program. Most of the values-eradicating work that remains to be done is right here at home. There are still a lot of Western consumers who haven’t completely embraced “democracy,” and who are clinging to old “despotic” values … racist values, religious values, nativist values, xenophobic values, homophobic values, transphobic values, cultural and artistic values, ableist values, alloist values, shadeism, lookism, ethnocentrism, cisgenderism, anti-Semitism, jingoism, sexism, sizeism, saneism … the list goes on and on, and on.

Democracy (i.e., global capitalism) will not rest until it has cleansed society (i.e., the global marketplace) of these ugly, destructive, despotic values, and implemented a worldwide “code of conduct” (like the ones that most global corporations have) with universal “anti-hate-speech rules,” and “appropriate vocabulary” lists, and has erased any visible symbol of such despotic values from public view, and any references to them from school curricula, and has otherwise transformed humanity into a mass of hyper-conformist consumers who all look like models in a Benetton commercial and talk like customer service representatives.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m in favor of democracy, and I’m not a fan of racism or any other type of discrimination or bigotry. I’m just trying to shed a little light on the forces behind the identity-politics zealotry that has been raging recently, and the “populist” backlash against such zealotry.

This zealotry, this crusade for ideological conformity, is described by many leftists as a movement to establish “social justice,” and by many right-wing types as “cultural Marxism.” It is neither. Or … OK, it contains elements of both, but fundamentally it is global capitalism purifying society of despotic values, establishing that infinite, value-free, meaningless “desert of the real” I described above.’

That’s it. I warned you that it was rather lengthy. It was written in September of 2020, so about six months into the roll-out of the New Normal.

As for the Roald-Dahl dust-up, what will happen now (and what is currently happening) is that A-list authors, journalists, and other official mouthpieces of the global-capitalist Simulation of Culture will make a big stink for a couple days, and then Penguin Random House and the other “big-five” publishers will go on “sensitivity-editing,” and “authenticity-editing,” and otherwise aggressively homogenizing mainstream literature until it won’t really matter which books you read because they will all be minor variations of each other that will resemble nothing so much in their utterly soul-deadening, interchangeable blandness as the lobbies of corporate offices.

Of course, if you are into the literature thing, you can always seek out and read other books by disreputable and “insensitive” authors like me who are unaffiliated with any global publishing behemoths, that is, assuming they haven’t been hidden from you behind these fake “sensitive content” warnings.

###

CJ Hopkins
February 21, 2023
Photo: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory/Paramount Pictures

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

So, Matt Taibbi is going after the Consent Factory. No, not my blog. The actual Consent Factory. The unimaginably powerful, mostly decentralized, global-capitalist propaganda apparatus that manufactures what passes for “reality” in our increasingly totalitarian age. Or he is going after the U.S. division of it, anyway.

Needless to say, I’m pretty excited.

Why am I so excited, you ask? Haven’t I been hopping up and down and bouncing off the walls of my enclosure hooting and screeching about how the so-called “Twitter Files” are a “limited hangout” and hurling verbal feces at all and sundry involved like an agitated baboon?

Well, yes, in fact, I have. And I intend to keep on doing that. But here’s what I’m excited about. Pay close attention to the job description in Matt’s recent help-wanted ad for freelancers:

“[W]e’re trying to map a new wing of the U.S. government’s propaganda apparatus that popped into view thanks to the Twitter Files. State-directed censorship is scary, but the more disturbing activity we’re seeing inside companies like Twitter involves what you might call ‘offensive’ information operations, a type of aggressive official messaging that all governments practice but is supposed to be restricted by law in the United States.”

Matt goes on to explain the background of the project:

“In a remarkably short time since the end of the Obama presidency, the U.S. government has funded an elaborate network of NGOs and think-tanks whose researchers call themselves independent ‘disinformation experts.’ They describe their posture as defensive — merely ‘tracking’ or ‘countering’ foreign disinformation — but in truth they aggressively court both the domestic news media and platforms like Twitter, often becoming both the sources for news stories and/or the referring authorities for censorship requests. The end result has been relentless censorship of, and mountains of (often deceptive) state-sponsored propaganda about, legitimate American political activity.”

OK, sure, Matt’s Racket News project will almost certainly be limited in scope to operations in the United States, and will probably still be a limited hangout to the degree that it presents a propaganda/disinformation/censorship model wherein power flows downward from the U.S. government to the corporate media and social-media corporations in the outmoded despotic (i.e., Orwellian) fashion that everyone is used to understanding the functioning of oppressive power according to, and I’ll definitely hoot and screech about that. However, at least as far as I’m aware, this project will be the first attempt by any high-profile independent journalist to investigate and report on an essential component of the aforementioned official-propaganda apparatus in any kind of systematic manner (“systematic” being the important term here, as we’re talking about a cohesive system, and not a series of arbitrary individual actions).

Or at least that sounds like what Matt has in mind.

If Matt and the Racket team pull this off, it will be quite a journalistic accomplishment, which will be totally ignored, perfunctorily dismissed, branded “far-right disinformation,” and then methodically visibility filtered by the official propaganda-and-disinformation apparatus that the project intends to expose a part of. That is, unless they are extremely careful, and restrict their reporting to certain designated areas within the Consent Factory campus, in which case, well … you know, awards, book deals, television appearances, the whole nine yards.

I like and respect Matt, and I’d like to see that happen for him. So, I want to do what I can to help. I am not a researcher or an infographics designer, but I thought I could point out some “no-go zones” that he and his team will need to avoid if they want to preserve any chance in hell of not being formally excommunicated from the Church of Seriousness and cast out into the Outer Darkness of the Nethernet where David Icke and Alex Jones hang out and you don’t show up on Google searches.

OK, the first and most important thing that Matt and his team will need to avoid is the fact that the U.S. government is not what has been waging a global War on Dissent, and a global War on Populism, and conducting a global Gleichschaltung campaign whereby societies throughout the world are being ideologically “synchronized” and purged of any and all forms of deviance from global-capitalist ideology since approximately the Summer of 2016. So they will need to stick to the domestic U.S. story and ignore all that “global-capitalism” stuff … which, OK, that could get kind of awkward, given the existence of the rest of the world.

In order to successfully ignore all that stuff — which, knowing Matt, he will be tempted to delve into — they will absolutely need to commit to not hiring a slew of international researchers and convincing Elon Musk to grant them access to the global “Twitter Files” from countries like the U.K., Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Australia, Canada, et cetera, so that they can report on how the global-capitalist propaganda apparatus operated in virtually perfect lockstep, globally, from 2020 to 2022, and is still operating, in virtually perfect lockstep, globally, right this very minute.

That means they will need to give a wide berth to the official Covid-pandemic narrative and all the government and corporate propaganda and visibility-filtering connected therewith, which was clearly a global enterprise of which the U.S. government was only one part. They will need to pretend that some sort of “Chinese wall” exists between the stories of the PSYOP commonly known as “Russiagate” (a/k/a The War on Populism) and the PSYOP commonly known as “the Pandemic,” and report on the former as if the latter had almost nothing to do with the former, and were not an extension and evolution of the former, as the former was an extension of the War on Terror, which they will also need to give a wide berth to, or else the history of the last 33 years might end up looking like the evolution of some globally hegemonic system (like, for example, global capitalism) toward some ultimate totalitarian morphology.

Basically, they will need to avoid the whole “global-capitalism” thing entirely and report their story as if the world were comprised of competing sovereign nation-states that were acting in their national interests, and for the benefit of their citizens, and so on, and not just a bunch of interdependent global-capitalist administrative entities staffed by fascist maniacs and greedy, half-witted functionaries who couldn’t care less about their fellow citizens, much less their so-called “democratic rights,” and who would gladly establish a global market for their children’s organs if they thought they could get away with it.

Opening up that can of worms would lead them straight into the heart of the Consent Factory (again, not my little blog, but the decentralized, supranational network of governments, global corporations, non-governmental governing entities, financial behemoths, corporate and state media, the majority of the Culture Industry, et cetera). Once inside, they could get lost in there forever, crawling down rabbit holes, pulling at strings, unraveling something that can never be unraveled, or not completely in any event, and which most people don’t want to see unraveled, not even just a little bit, because, once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and soon you start to see it everywhere, and before you know it you end up raving about the CIA assassinating Kennedy, or NATO blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, or neo-Nazis in the Ukraine, or whatever.

Another area that Matt and his Racket team will need to studiously avoid when digging through the “Twitter Files” that Elon Musk is granting them unrestricted and unconditional access to is any evidence of how the new Free-Speech Twitter is continuing, and actually intensifying, its visibility-filtering of political speech … especially political speech that does not fit neatly into a red/blue paradigm, or that reminds the public about how the Covid-PSYOP was a global PSYOP that was rolled out all at once, globally, and not just a series of “well-intentioned overreactions” and “mistakes,” and so on.

Reporting on Twitter’s current and intensified censorship and visibility-filtering activities (and whichever other entities are currently involved therewith) will only detract from the reporting on Twitter’s former censorship and visibility-filtering activities (and the other entities involved therewith), and confuse people, and leave them feeling hopeless, and depressed, and suspicious of the actual motives of its owner, a billionaire military/Intelligence community contractor.

I know Matt, so I know it will be hard to resist the temptation to delve into all these forbidden areas of inquiry and “no-go” zones, and stick to the past-tense domestic story, but, as a friend and colleague who has been consigned to the aforementioned ignominious Nethernet, I would urge him to exercise some self-discipline and refrain from any such reckless delving. He is not going to do anyone any good by going full-Howard Beale on Substack, and getting himself and Glenn Greenwald horridly machine-gunned to death on System Update by GloboCap-sponsored Bolsonaran guerillas. And the story he’s setting out to report will be a big, fat, big-titted hit in itself! There’s no need to go after the entire Consent Factory and depress the living hell out of everyone. After all, that’s what blogs like the Consent Factory are for.

###

CJ Hopkins
February 13, 2023
Photos: Google, Twitter

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.

There comes a time near the end of every PSYOP when the PSYOP has achieved its objective, or as much of its objective as it is going to achieve, and is becoming increasingly recognizable as a PSYOP, and so the focus shifts to damage control, and erasing the PSYOP from official history.

This is a crucial stage of the PSYOP, because, at this point, a significant percentage of the public have realized that they’ve been thoroughly mindfucked, and many of them are none too happy about it. Some of them are starting to ask awkward questions, like “why were we deceived and coerced by our governments, global health authorities, and the state and corporate media into submitting to a series of experimental ‘vaccinations’ that appear to be killing and injuring a lot of people?” Or “why are we occupying and torturing the residents of a Middle-Eastern country that never attacked us, and never had any intention to attack us, and which posed no threat to us whatsoever?”

At this point, it is way too late for those engaged in conducting the PSYOP to continue to deny the facts and gaslight the masses. That won’t work anymore. So, it is time to do some limited hangouts, and some whitewashing, and a little sleight-of-hand, and just generally confuse and distract the public, and send them off on various wild goose chases, while the official history of the PSYOP is written.

For example, say you’re just wrapping up a PSYOP in which you radically restructured society into a pathologized-totalitarian dystopia where the majority of the masses went full-blown fascist, mindlessly following senseless orders, parroting official propaganda, and demonizing and persecuting those who refused to conform to the new official ideology … say you are just winding down a PSYOP like that, and what you need to erase from your official history is the fact that your entire PSYOP was based on nothing but faked statistics, because the pandemic you used as a pretext for your PSYOP was most closely comparable to the medium influenza pandemics of 1936, 1957, and 1968, so it never remotely came close to justifying any of your fake “emergency health measures,” much less the radical restructuring of society into some paranoid, totalitarian “New Normal” … and now you need to erase all that from history, and you need to distract people while you do it.

Well, one thing that almost always works is what stage magicians call “misdirection,” which means, focusing the audience’s attention on something unimportant while you perform the trick, like … wait, what the hell is that over there?! Is that a MUTANT COMMUNIST VIRUS?!

That’s right, folks, the Pfizer Corporation is engineering SECRET MUTANT COMMIE COVID VIRUS BIOWEAPONS that trigger MASS FORMATION PSYCHOSIS! Break out your AR-15s and your checkbooks!

Or whatever. I think you get the picture.

This type of ham-handed misdirection is extremely effective on a certain demographic, but it doesn’t work on everyone. Those who haven’t awakened to the Sino-Judeo-Commie-Satanist-Occupation-Global-Government plot to depopulate and culturally Marxify the world with the assistance of global corporations like Pfizer, or who have some knowledge of sleight-of-hand techniques, or basic public-relations tactics, tend not to respond as enthusiastically.

So they need to be misdirected more subtly.

And that’s where limited hangouts come in. As I outlined in a recent essay, limited hangouts are an elegant means of preventing people from exposing your PSYOP. You just “hang out” a limited part of the PSYOP, one that you know won’t do you much damage, and let the masses feed on that. They’ll be so grateful to get a little part of the truth that they’ll forget about the other parts of it, the parts that matter, which you are never going to give them.

So how do you go about doing that, exactly? It isn’t as complicated as you might imagine. All you need to do is pick the right journalists, plug them in, and let them do what they do. They don’t need to be instructed or monitored. You know what they are going to report, and what they are going to avoid reporting.

Take the latest “Covid Twitter Files” for example.

Imagine, you’re Lee Fang, a journalist at The Intercept, and you are given access to the Twitter database to research censorship of the facts Twitter censored in order to prop up the official Covid narrative and ensure that as many people as possible were injected with experimental “vaccines” that they did not need but were coerced into taking, and which have killed and injured millions of people, and, instead of researching and reporting that story, what you decide to report on is the censorship of users demanding access to these same “vaccines.”

Seriously, think about that for a minute.

I’m not suggesting that Lee Fang, or any of the other “Covid Twitter Files” journalists, or those helping to promote them, are “controlled opposition” or anything paranoid (and silly) like that. The most effective PSYOPs don’t work that way. Journalists like Fang don’t have to be told what they are allowed and not allowed to report on. They know that instinctively. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be who they are and doing what they’re doing. Lee Fang, for example, is a millionaire, working for Pierre Omidyar.

Journalists like Lee Fang, Alex Berenson, and even Glenn Greenwald — whom I like and respect — are the perfect vehicles for limited hangouts. They have the requisite “outsider” credentials while still being members of George Carlin’s “big club” (or maybe just “associate members” … a few million dollars isn’t what it used to be).

The point is, such journalists sincerely believe that they are “independent,” and “adversarial,” and in many instances they actually are … just not when it comes to reporting a story like the most elaborate mass-PSYOP in human history, which is what we’ve been experiencing for the last three years. Crossing that line would mean the end of everything for them, their money, their status, their social and professional networks, basically, their entire lives. No one has to explain this to them. They got where they are by knowing exactly where that line is, and how close they can get to it, without ever actually stepping over it.

If you ask them, they will tell you “there is no such line,” not for “adversarial” journalists like them, not because they are lying, but because they cannot see it. They have been trained, and have trained themselves, to not see it. As Noam Chomsky explained in a classic interview with Andrew Marr of the BBC, “I’m sure you believe everything you are saying. What I am saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”

OK, one more quick Lee Fang example, which has nothing to do with the Covid story. It has to do with Matt Taibbi’s latest Twitter Files report. Note that Matt, unlike Fang and Berenson, has the sense to steer clear of the “Covid Twitter Files,” mostly, which is a lose/lose equation for famous adversarial journalists. But that’s aside from the point. Here’s the Fang tweet …

Hamilton 68 was not “a scam” and the media didn’t “fall for it.” It was a PSYOP, and the media participated in it. If you think I’m nitpicking, you don’t understand how official narratives are created and maintained. They are not created and maintained with magic or top-secret mind-control technologies. They are created and maintained with words … words that frame events in a certain way, and are repeated and reprinted, over and over, by persons and organizations of influence, until they become officially “what happened.”

You are witnessing the beginning of that process right now. Fang’s tweet is just one of many examples. By portraying the media as the victims of a “scam,” the actual PSYOP in which the media participated is erased, and their complicity is portrayed as mere “incompetence.” This should be familiar to anyone who was paying attention during the “War on Terror.” Compare Fang’s framing (i.e., the media tricked by “a scam”) to the framing of the Iraqi-WMDs-PSYOP, which concluded with the same type of limited hangouts and “corrections” by the corporate press (after the PSYOP had achieved its objective, of course).

As The New York Times put it in its 2004 “correction” …

“… we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge. The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on ”regime change” in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks. […] Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations — in particular, this one.“

And so on. In other words, “mistakes were made.”

Again, Fang’s tweet has nothing to do with the Covid-PSYOP or the “Covid Twitter Files.” It’s just an example of how the system works. Even in the “Hamilton 68” story, there are certain lines that cannot be crossed. The corporate and state media and so-called “papers of record” can be portrayed as “dumb,” “sloppy,” “incompetent,” and even “unethical” and “driven by greed,” but they cannot be portrayed as the propaganda apparatus of a supranational global capitalist system, an apparatus that is functioning perfectly, because that would sound like a “conspiracy theory.”

Which it isn’t, as I believe I have just demonstrated again, and as Chomsky explained in that Andrew Marr interview. There is no “cabal” of evil “elites” running the “PSYOP” that I keep referring to, not in any kind of James-Bond fashion. There never is. There doesn’t have to be. Yes, there are powerful people in the world, and yes, of course they conspire to further their interests, and to amass more power and enrich themselves, but that is not how the globally-hegemonic ideological system we all live in works.

It works by conditioning us from a very early age to sense where “the-lines-that-cannot-be-crossed” are, and by weeding out and quarantining those of us who cross them anyway. But that’s a topic for another lengthy column.

The point is, the PSYOP that we have all been subjected to for going on the last three years is not going to be exposed, ever. The damage control and memory-holing will continue, and the misdirections and limited hangouts will continue, and the whitewashing of corporations like Twitter and the corporate media and “papers of record” will continue, and the Covid-PSYOP will be erased from history, like the WMDs-PSYOP was erased from history … and people will get used to their “vaccinations,” like they got used to taking off their shoes at the airport.

Eventually, even obsessive “conspiracy theorists” like me will tire of writing about it, and we will turn our attention to less depressing topics. That will be kind of a relief, I guess. Maybe I can finally be funny again … if I can forget about all those dead and severely injured people!

###

CJ Hopkins
January 30, 2023
Photos: Twitter

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 Mother of All Limited Hangouts has begun. Yes, I’m talking about the “Covid Twitter Files,” which are finally being released to the public, in almost textbook limited-hangout fashion. I’ll get into that in just a minute, but first, let’s review what a “limited hangout” is, for those who are not familiar with the term.

The way a limited hangout works is, if you’re an intelligence agency, or a global corporation, or a government, or a non-governmental organization, and you have been doing things you need to hide from the public, and those things are starting to come to light such that you can’t just deny that you are doing them anymore, what you do is, you release a limited part of the story (i.e., the story of whatever it is you’re doing) to distract people’s attention from the rest of the story. The part you release is the “limited hangout.” It’s not a lie. It’s just not the whole story. You “hang it out” so that it will become the whole story, and thus stop people from pursuing the whole story.

Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA who went on to become a critic of the Intelligence Community, described the tactic this way in 1978 …

“… a favorite and frequently used gimmick of clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting, sometimes even volunteering, some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”

All right, so, you’re probably asking, if the “Covid Twitter Files” are a limited hangout, what’s the whole story that they’re distracting us from?

Let me try to refresh your memory.

In March and April of 2020, in the course of roughly five to six weeks, the majority of societies throughout the world were transformed into pathologized-totalitarian police states. A global “shock-and-awe” campaign was conducted. Constitutional rights were suspended. The masses were locked down inside their homes, where they were subjected to the most massive official propaganda blitzkrieg in human history. Goon squads roamed the streets of Europe, the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia, Asia, the Americas, and elsewhere, beating and arresting people for being outdoors without permission and not wearing medical-looking masks. Corporate media around the world informed us that life as we knew it was over … a “new normal” was coming, and we needed to get used to it.

The entire official pandemic narrative was rolled out during those first few weeks. Everything. Masks. Mandatory “vaccines.” “Vaccination” passports. The segregation of “the Unvaccinated.” The censorship and demonization of dissent. Everything. The whole “New Normal” package. It was rolled out all at once, globally.

If your memory of what happened is a little hazy … well, have a look at this 257-tweet Twitter thread of corporate-media articles compiled in March and April of 2020, documenting the initial “shock-and-awe” campaign …

That is the story. How that happened. Why that happened. And who or what made it happen. It isn’t a story about a virus, or our governments’ reactions to a virus. It is the story of the radical restructuring of society based on lies and official propaganda, executed, globally, through sheer brute force and systematic psychological conditioning. It is the story of the implementation of our new totalitarian global-capitalist “reality” … the “New Normal” that was announced in the Spring of 2020. It is not a story the global-capitalist ruling classes can permit to be told, except by “crazy conspiracy theorists,” “science deniers,” and other “crackpots” and “extremists.”

All right, so … the “Covid Twitter Files,” or the “Fauci Files,” or whatever we’re calling them. If you wanted to bury the actual story (i.e., the story I just outlined above) with a limited hangout and discredit those of us who have been trying to report it for nearly three years, you couldn’t do any better than Elon Musk is doing. Instead of a story about how the entire global-capitalist power apparatus coordinated with global IT corporations like Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al., to conduct a global Gleichschaltung op the scale of which Goebbels could have never dreamed of, censoring and visibility-filtering dissent and enforcing the official pandemic narrative, not just in the USA, but in countries all throughout the world … instead of that monumental story, we are getting The Alex Berenson Show!, starring Alex Berenson as Alex Berenson, with a special guest appearance by Alex Berenson, written and directed by Alex Berenson, and so on.

Seriously, though, who better to handle the “Covid Twitter Files” than Alex Berenson, in whose opinion the events of the last three years were simply due to mass hysteria (or Pandemia, $14.99 on Amazon), and certainly not to any kind of coordinated radical restructuring of society by the global-capitalist power apparatus, or any other wild conspiracy theories. Forget about that 257-tweet thread I compiled in March and April of 2020. What actually happened, according to Alex Berenson, was that people just went kind of crazy, and overreacted, and “mistakes were made.” Mistakes like Twitter suspending Alex Berenson, and other very important people! Or, wait, no, it wasn’t just mass hysteria … it was also Pfizer and Dr. Scott Gottlieb, and the White House, and someone named Andrew Slavitt, all of whom conspired with “Old Evil Twitter” to suspend Alex Berenson from the platform, all of whom Alex will be suing forthwith!

The Alex Berenson Show is just getting started, so definitely stay tuned to “Free-Speech Twitter” to follow all of Alex Berenson’s exploits as he leads “Team Reality” to its ultimate victory over “Team Apocalypse” and exposes the crimes of the usual assortment of official “bad apples,” or whatever cartoonish fairy tales Alex Berenson and Elon Musk have in store for us! It promises to be quite the spectacle!

I’ll be covering the show in my columns, of course — I still have a few subscribers and readers who I haven’t totally alienated yet — and discussing “The Art of the Limited Hangout” for the benefit of anyone still paying attention in the weeks and months and possibly years ahead. If you are one of the many people who now appear to seriously believe that military-contractor oligarchs like Elon Musk and narcissistic ass clowns like Alex Berenson are going to deliver us from the New Normal Reich, and “prosecute Fauci,” and end corporate censorship, or in any way meaningfully bite the hand of the global-capitalist system that feeds them, you may want to give those columns a miss.

For the rest of you, I will do my best to point out how this phase of the PSYOP works, because it’s going to last for quite a while. The “Covid Twitter Files” are not The Mother of All Limited Hangouts; they’re just one part of it. There are many more limited hangouts to come. The New Normal having been successfully implemented, the history of its implementation is now being written (or, rather, rewritten) to conform to the official Covid narrative, a process which will likely continue for years.

Those of you who are old enough might recall this phase from “The War on Terror.” It started around April 2004, when the Abu Ghraib torture photos were released, and continued until the Summer of 2016, when The War on Terror was abruptly cancelled and replaced by The War on Populism, which prepared us for the implementation of the New Normal in the Spring of 2020. All of which is part of an even larger story, i.e., the story of the evolution of the first globally-hegemonic power system in history, which, lacking any external adversary, has nothing to do but go totalitarian, eliminating all internal resistance and establishing ideological uniformity throughout the territory it occupies, which, in this case, means the entire planet.

Sorry … I know, history is boring, and complicated, and not nearly as fun (and cathartic) as the shit-slinging circus that Musk is making of the Twitter Files. Personally, I can’t wait to find out which official “bad apple” they’re going to offer us in today’s edition of the Two Minutes Hate, and who’s going to be released from “Old Twitter Prison,” and, whatever, anyway, don’t worry about all that evolution-of-global-capitalism stuff. It’s probably just a bunch of fancy-sounding nonsense I made up to try to sell you my books, or to make myself sound smart, or something.

Forget that I even mentioned that stuff. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show!

###

CJ Hopkins
January 11, 2023
Photos: SNL/NBC, Twitter

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 has been quite a year, 2022. I’m officially dubbing it “The Year of the Gaslighter.” I was going to dub it “The Year of the Mother of All Mindfucking Global-Capitalist Gaslighters,” but that seemed like a mouthful, so I’m opting for brevity.

Seriously, if there were an Olympics of Gaslighting, GloboCap (i.e., the global corporatocracy) would take the gold in every event. At this point, the majority of the global masses have been successfully gaslighted into a semi-conscious, quasi-cyclothymic state in which they oscillate, on a moment-by-moment basis, between robotic obedience and impotent rage. Those who are not still walking around in their masks and prophylactic face shields and injecting themselves with experimental “vaccines” for reasons they no longer even pretend to be able to articulate without gibbering like imbeciles are genuflecting at the feet of an oligarch huckster who they believe has come to deliver them from Wokeness.

If you were GloboCap, and in the process of imposing your new official ideology on the entire planet in a kind of global Gleichschaltung op, and otherwise establishing your “New Normal Reich,” and you needed the masses confused and compliant, you couldn’t ask for much more from your Gaslighting Division!

The gaslighting got underway in January, when the corporate media, health authorities, and other major organs of the New Normal Reich started suddenly “discovering” that the official Covid narrative was “inaccurate,” or, you know, a bunch of lies.

A series of limited hangouts ensued.

Suddenly, it appeared that the “Covid case” and “Covid death” statistics were inaccurate, or inflated, or had been fabricated. The “vaccines” didn’t work. They were killing people. Lockdowns had been a “serious mistake.” And so on. Duplicitous politicians, pusillanimous public-health authorities, perfidious pundits, and assorted other professional sycophants and lying weasels were shocked to discover they had inadvertently been part of the most insidious PSYOP that had ever been perpetrated on the masses in the history of insidious mass-PSYOPs.

The Last Days of the Covidian Cult were upon us! The Corporatocracy had overplayed their hand, and underestimated their opposition, and they knew it.

But the Cult was not going to go down quietly. In February, in Ottawa, Canada, thousands of truckers and other working-class people who had had enough of the Pandemic PSYOP occupied the streets outside the capitol and demanded an end to “vaccination mandates,” segregation of “the Unvaccinated,” and other “emergency health measures.” Justin Trudeau, the Canadian media, and their counterparts throughout the New Normal Reich immediately denounced the protesters as “treasonous, Russia-backed, transphobic, Nazi terrorists.”

This affront to the authority of the New Normal Reich could not be allowed to go unpunished, so Trudeau declared de facto martial law and unleashed a battalion of militarized police and other unidentified goons to beat and trample the protesters with horses (including one old lady with a “terrorist walker”). Then he went about hunting down and freezing the bank accounts of any Canadians who had donated to the protest, and otherwise attempting to destroy the lives of anyone who had disobeyed him.

This display of contempt for the rule of law and the ruthlessness of the New Normal Reich was one of the last of the bloody crackdowns on dissidents in countries all over the world that had been in progress for over a year by then, e.g., in Australia, The Netherlands, France, Germany, China, and other countries. These vicious “crackdowns” on peaceful protests were conducted “to protect the public health,” of course, and were not at all a display of brute force meant to intimidate the masses into obedience. The global-capitalist ruling classes are not fascists, or totalitarians, after all, and anyone who suggests they are is clearly a “Russia-backed, Covid-denying, conspiracy-theorizing extremist,” or whatever.

Oh, and speaking of totalitarians, and fascists, and goose-stepping, Sieg-heiling neo-Nazis, the Gaslighting Cavalcade of 2022 reached a whole new level of gaslighting in March, when, after years of provocation, Russia finally invaded Ukraine, and all the Ukrainian neo-Nazis that the corporate media had been extensively reporting on magically vanished into the ether.

Yes, it was Springtime for the GloboCap Nazis! And not just for the GloboCap Nazis! Liberals, still struggling with withdrawal symptoms from the adrenaline rush of the Covidian Cult, and the thrill of fanatically persecuting “the Unvaccinated,” suddenly had a new official narrative that they could mindlessly parrot and fanatically defend from the “conspiracy theorists” and “disinformationists.”

The only problem was, it didn’t make any sense. According to the new official narrative, those reports of Ukrainian neo-Nazis by virtually every mainstream media outlet and Nazi-hunting organization on the planet in the years leading up to 2022 were now, suddenly, just “Russian propaganda.” GloboCap hadn’t even bothered to scrub or visibility-filter those reports. They were all still right there on the Internet.

And, OK, the other problem was, in order to remain “New Normals in Good Standing” and keep their jobs and social contacts, liberals were now forced to actively cheer for swastika-tattooed, Sieg-heiling Nazis, and look the other way as Ukrainian fascists advocated the mass murder of children and quoted Adolf Eichmann on Ukrainian television.

The Spring and Summer were kind of a blur, or maybe I was just preoccupied with publishing The Rise of the New Normal Reich, a collection of my essays documenting the rollout of the New Normal in 2020 and 2021, which was an international Barnes & Noble and Amazon bestseller upon its release, and then was promptly banned by Amazon in Germany, The Netherlands, and Austria, and labelled with a “Covid-19 vaccine warning” advising readers to visit the CDC before purchasing and (God help them!) reading the book in every other Amazon market.

I vaguely remember something about monkeypox, but, mostly, when I wasn’t promoting the book, or struggling to keep my breakfast down after seeing another one of my liberal friends cheering for neo-Nazis on Facebook, I was focused on events here in New Normal Germany (which, yes, mask mandates are still in effect), and The Normalization of the New Normal Reich (which, no, is not over, but is just beginning), and attempting to start to emotionally recover from two solid years of official gaslighting, demonization, segregation, and so on.

Fortunately, in September, right on cue, as I was working through my emotional issues, i.e., how most of my former friends and colleagues had either gone silent and looked away as our constitutional rights were cancelled, dissent was censored and demonized, goon squads were dispatched to brutalize dissidents, experimental “vaccines” were forced on people, a social segregation system was implemented, and so on, or else, if they hadn’t gone silent, they had joined the shrieking fascistic mob … just as I was starting to process all that, as were a lot of other people, a prophet arrived on the “freedom” scene!

That’s right, as it turned out, I was totally wrong about the new totalitarianism, and how it works! I had stupidly assumed it was a political phenomenon … you know, a sociopolitical and cultural system imposed on the masses from above by force, but, according to Mattias Desmet, it’s actually a psychological phenomenon, a “mass formation” or “mass hypnosis”-type thing!

It’s possible that I’m not describing it correctly. As his devoted fans have repeatedly informed me, I don’t understand the nuances of Desmet’s theory. He explained it all on the Alex Jones show, while he was lying, which he does, repeatedly, but … whatever. I’m not a professor of psychology. The point is, the Covidian Cultists were all hypnotized! No one was threatening or gaslighting the masses! The poor confused things were doing it to themselves!

But that was not the end of the gaslighting. Globocap saved the best for last!

See, the problem was, there were all these people who hadn’t joined the Covidian Cult or any other part of the New Normal movement, and who were extremely angry about having been demonized, and segregated, and censored, and gaslighted, and so on, by their governments, global corporations, non-governmental governing entities, the corporate media, “scientific experts,” and the majority of the masses for two and a half years.

Something needed to be done about all that anger. It needed to be redirected somewhere. At something that wasn’t GloboCap, and that wouldn’t interfere with the New Normal program.

Emperor Elonicus to the rescue!

If Elon Musk wasn’t actually appointed by the global-capitalist ruling classes to redirect the pent-up anger of “the Unvaccinated” demographic, and the “Systematically Censored and Demonized” demographic, and everyone else who opposed the New Normal into a balls-out left/right shit-slinging contest … well, they couldn’t have found anyone better for the job.

Consider what he’s accomplished in the space of six weeks. After purchasing Twitter for $44 billion, he bought himself a couple of independent journalists — because who could resist the Twitter Files? I certainly couldn’t have, had I been in their position — and is staging the most audacious limited hangout in the history of audacious limited hangouts. Whether it will work over the longer term is unclear — Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi are already starting to become uncomfortable with being perceived and treated as Elon Musk’s employees — but, so far, it is going gangbusters!

Now, students of limited hangouts, whitewashing, and other COINTELPRO ops, really need to pay attention. Because the beauty of this limited hangout is that the “hangout” is actually a monumental story, an up-close look at the nuts-and-bolts processes of the global-capitalist Ministry of Truth. As Matt Taibbi reported in a recent piece …

“… the Twitter Files show something new. We now have clear evidence that agencies like the FBI and the DHS are in the business of mass-analyzing social media activity — your tweets and mine, down to the smallest users with the least engagement — and are, themselves, mass-marking posts to be labeled, ‘bounced,’ deleted or ‘visibility filtered’ by firms like Twitter. The technical and personnel infrastructure for this effort is growing. As noted in the thread, the FBI’s social media-focused task force now has at least 80 agents, and is in constant contact with Twitter for all sorts of reasons. The FBI is not doing this as part of any effort to build criminal cases. They’ve taken on this new authority unilaterally, as part of an apparently massive new effort to control and influence public opinion. These agencies claim variously to be concerned about election integrity, foreign interference, medical misinformation, and monitoring domestic extremism, among other things. As crises wax and wane, the building out of the censorship infrastructure to ever-bigger and broader dimensions has been constant, suggesting that creating and deploying the tool to manipulate opinion was always the real end.”

And this monumental story is being buried in shit … American red/blue partisan shit. With a series of ham-handed PR stunts, cheap provocations, attention-grabbing antics, and good old-fashioned diversionary shit-slinging, Musk is (a) whitewashing the new “free-speech Twitter,” which continues to censor and defame us with impunity, (b) burying the actual story under a steaming heap of partisan acrimony, and (c) driving a big blunt wedge into the supra-partisan coalition of forces that had aligned in opposition to the roll-out of the New Normal.

That, my friends, is some world-class gaslighting! And the wildest part is, he probably doesn’t even consciously realize what he’s doing. Nevertheless, by the time he’s done playing grab-ass with the freedom-of-speech thing, and getting revenge on Taylor Lorenz, and so on, corporate censorship will have been completely normalized. “Freedom of speech” will be a running joke, as opposing camps of hate-drunk hypocrites take turns applauding as global corporations and their governmental partners censor one camp or the other.

On that cheery note, I’ll sign off for the year, and go tend to all the irate messages I’m getting from abject Elon Musk worshipers, and the hate-email from assorted anti-Semites, and so on, and then hibernate until 2023.

Oh, yeah, and those “Covid Twitter Files.” I can’t wait to scroll through those with a nice glass of eggnog. I’m sure they will be coming out any day now, maybe even on Christmas morning!

Happy holidays to one and all!

###

CJ Hopkins
December 18, 2022
Photo: Gaslight, MGM

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, Elon Musk’s new free-speech Twitter appears to going extremely well. Critics of the official Covid narrative, and the official Ukraine narrative, and Elon Musk, are still being deplatformed, censored, and defamed, but, otherwise, you can tweet whatever you want! If you want to tweet about how Elon is running Twitter almost single-handedly while personally caring for his nine hungry children and “being a journalist” without ever sleeping, or how he’s “driving down the cost of access to outer space,” or “improving life on Earth for humanity” while planning to exfiltrate himself and his family and friends in the military community (and anyone else who can afford a ticket) to Mars if something goes catastrophically wrong, or is otherwise heroically “doing God’s work,” go for it … you can tweet stuff like that all day!

OK, sure, if you don’t want to do that, and, instead, you want to tweet about the systematic destabilization and radical restructuring of global society that has been carried out by the global-capitalist ruling classes during the past three years, or the most insidious official propaganda and gaslighting campaign in human history, or if you want to tweet about neo-Nazis in the Ukraine, or anything else the Emperor Elonicus doesn’t want you to tweet about, well, not to put too fine a point on it, you’re fucked. Fucked as in suspended, or censored, or “deboosted,” or “visibility filtered,” or maybe your account is just hidden from view behind one of these fake “sensitive content” warnings, exactly like it was on non-free-speech Twitter …

But whatever … that’s a small price to pay for privilege of “shitposting” and “owning the libs,” which, that was the whole point of the Twitter takeover, wasn’t it (i.e., revenge, as opposed to actual free speech)? Who cares if scientists, medical experts, and critics of the New Normal are still being censored? Andrew Anglin, the neo-Nazi editor of The Daily Stormer, is back! That will certainly stick it to those “shitlibs”!

And then there’s the release of the Twitter Files, which is turning into a le Carré thriller! Yes, that’s right, Elonicus the Just is releasing in-house documentation of the rogue cabal of liberal “bad apples” that were arbitrarily censoring conservatives, not for any systematic ideological-narrative-enforcement reasons, but just because, well, you know, they’re liberals, or “leftists,” or “cultural Marxists,” or whatever!

Part Two, published by Bari Weiss on Thursday, focused on Twitter’s notorious blacklists, and included screenshots and other evidence of how Twitter executives censored, “deranked,” and otherwise intentionally disappeared and misrepresented information and political views they did not like and so decided that no one should be able to read. Part Three, published by Matt Taibbi last night, documented the censorship and eventual deplatforming of Donald J. Trump, who was The President of the United States at the time … so, yeah, another “nothingburger.”

Fortunately, it turns out, all this censorship, defamation, intentional deception of the public, interference in the political process, and so on, was the work of (you guessed it) a few “bad apples,” Yoel Roth, Parag Agrawal, Vijaya Gadde, and other “bad apples,” who have all been fired (or “exited”) by The Emperor Elonicus. So that’s all over now, and will never happen again, not as long as Elonicus reigns!

So, great, I’m glad that proof of the shenanigans that so many of us have been describing for years is finally definitively coming to light. However, eternal optimist that I am, I was hoping that the Twitter Files would at least broach the subject of how the global corporatocracy, and its government functionaries, and the state and corporate media, and global corporations like Twitter, have gone more or less full-blown totalitarian, and have been conducting a textbook Gleichschaltung campaign, imposing and enforcing ideological uniformity and systematically censoring those of us who have been questioning and challenging the official Covid narrative (and that destabilization and radical restructuring of global society that I mentioned above).

But let’s not get sidetracked by all that narrative stuff, or that global-capitalist totalitarianism stuff, or the countless people around the world that are dying “suddenly,” or “unexpectedly,” which, of course, has nothing to do with the multiple experimental “vaccinations” they were deceived and/or coerced into submitting to, which Twitter and the rest of the global-capitalist propaganda apparatus repeatedly assured us were “safe and effective,” and censored those of us who suggested that they might not be, or that we might not need to “vaccinate” every man, woman, and child on the planet.

All that stuff is water under the bridge. The important thing is American “red/blue” politics!

OK, before I get into the Twitter Files further, I need to do the “full-disclosure” thing. As I am sure you are aware, Elon Musk has chosen to release the selected Twitter Files to Matt Taibbi, and now also Bari Weiss, instead of, you know, just making them all public. Well, I know Matt Taibbi. We communicate occasionally. He has blurbed a few of my books. I respect him. I like him. I am seriously biased toward Matt Taibbi. I would have Matt Taibbi’s babies if he let me. Basically, I am in in love with Matt Taibbi, and would probably be creepily stalking him right now if I lived in the USA instead of here in Germany. I don’t know Bari Weiss at all, but, from what I can tell, she seems like a nice lady.

All right, that’s my full disclosure. Let’s get back to those Twitter Files.

So, here’s the other thing that is bothering me (i.e., in addition to how this story is gradually devolving into a “red/blue” slugfest). You saw the news about how James Baker, the FBI guy who worked with the Clinton team on perpetrating the Russiagate hoax and had a hand in censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story, was “vetting” the Twitter Files before they were released. Well, according to the story, Baker was doing this “vetting” unbeknownst to Elon Musk, who had apparently just accidentally forgotten to fire his Deputy General Counsel (who he had been aware of for at least eight months) when he fired all those other liberal “bad apples,” and so Elon, being totally “in the dark,” as it were, had absolutely no idea what Baker was doing to the Twitter Files until Bari Weiss caught it and brought it to his attention.

That bothers me … as in I do not believe it.

I want to be clear about what I’m saying. I’m not questioning Matt’s or Bari Weiss’ motives, or methods, and certainly not their characters. If I were in their positions, I’d be doing the same thing, getting my hands on as many “Twitter files” as possible and reporting the story that is there to report. They are journalists. That is what journalists do. They have also been around the block a few times, so I assume they are aware that they are swimming with sharks. If they weren’t previously, they certainly are now, after this fishy Baker “vetting” business.

What I’m saying is, how can we trust what they are getting? How many files were “vetted” by Baker? Why was he still in a position to “vet” them? Who’s “vetting” the files now that Baker has been “exited”? Which files have been given to Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss and which files have not been given to them? The reporting they are doing is like creating a collage; they can only work with the materials they are given, and the materials they are given will determine the story, or at least limit the nature and scope of the story.

Also, and notwithstanding my respect and disturbing affection for Matt Taibbi, neither Matt nor Bari Weiss have been particularly interested in covering the roll-out of the official Covid narrative, i.e., the most insidious propaganda and gaslighting campaign in human history, or the destabilization and radical restructuring of global society that I keep mentioning in this column and have been writing about, extensively, since March of 2020. So, even if Musk has dumped the entire Twitter database on Matt and Bari Weiss, I doubt that either of them are going to be exactly chomping at the bit to report that story.

Seriously, just imagine if they did. If you think the corporate media’s reaction to Matt Taibbi’s initial Twitter Files release was brutal — and it certainly was — imagine what would happen if he and Bari told the story of Twitter’s role in the global New Normal Gleichschaltung campaign. They would likely lose everything, publishers, book deals, literary agents, colleagues, friends. They would be excommunicated from the Hall of Seriousness, cast out into the outer darkness where the denylisted souls of “Covid-denying, conspiracy theorizing anti-vaxxers” moan into the void for all eternity.

Because telling that story would mean documenting everything … the fabricated “Covid cases” and “Covid deaths” statistics, the lies about the lockdowns, the masks, the “vaccines,” all of it, the whole New Normal megillah. Not how it’s “over now” because “the science changed,” but how the whole thing was one enormous PSYOP (regardless of whether or how much of it was intentional), how it was manufactured with lies and propaganda from the very beginning, in March of 2020.

Put yourself in Matt Taibbi’s and Bari Weiss’ position. If they tell that story, their lives will be destroyed. Go ahead, judge them if you want. I’m not interested in judgement, personally. I’m interested in seeing things as they are, and the way they are … well, we have a little quandary here, a quandary regarding the Twitter Files not turning out to be a limited hangout, or being perceived as a limited hangout.

And, so, in light of that little quandary, here is a proposal for Elon Musk. Maybe Matt, or Bari Weiss, or one of my “high-profile” right-wing readers can pass it on to him. You don’t have to tell him where it came from. It’s pretty simple. Here it is:

Share the Covid-narrative-censorship Twitter files with journalists who want to tell that story. Let Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss keep telling the story they are telling, which, make no mistake, is of historic importance (and is ultimately a part of the larger story that the Covid-narrative censorship is also part of), but share the files with other journalists who don’t have as much to lose, or who are willing to lose it to report the story, or who have already lost it and so don’t give a shit. If you actually meant “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” then how about a little Vox Populi, Elon?

If Elon Musk is serious about coming clean, and defending freedom of speech, and all that stuff, and not just whitewashing the company he just bought, and orchestrating an elaborate limited hangout, he can prove it by offering the Covid-narrative-censorship Twitter files to a few other journalists … journalists who want to report that story, who want to report that story right now, not two years from now, when no one cares anymore.

I have a hunch he might get a few takers.

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CJ Hopkins
December 10, 2022
Photo: Juan Oliphant @JuanSharks @OneOceanDiving

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