C.J. Hopkins's Blog, page 8

Everyone is going to hate this column. Musk worshipers are going to hate it because I’m going to blaspheme against Elon Musk. Musk demonizers are going to hate it because I am not going to blaspheme against him enough. Everyone else is going to hate it because they’re sick to the gills of hearing about Musk, and Musk’s destruction of Twitter, or his salvation of Twitter, and censorship, and “hate speech,” and all that stuff.

I’ll get to the blasphemy part in a minute, but first, let’s quickly review what’s happened, and where things now stand, or appear to stand.

On October 27, 2022, so almost exactly a month ago, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, US government military contractor and all-around global-capitalist oligarch with a net worth approaching $200 billion, completed his acquisition of Twitter, the notorious “hell-site” where Donald Trump, the Russian-backed literal Resurrection of Hitler, Jordan Peterson, the “lobster hierarchy” guy, Alex “the Devil Incarnate” Jones, and assorted members of the “deplorable” masses had been wantonly perpetrating acts of “hate speech,” disseminating “disinformation,” and otherwise unrestrainedly expressing themselves, until Twitter’s “content moderators” started censoring, deboosting, and deplatforming everyone whose views and opinions they didn’t like.

As it turned out, most of the views and opinions they did not like, and thus needed to censor, were views and opinions that conflicted with their increasingly fanatical “woke” ideology, or allegiance to the Democratic Party, or one of its European equivalents, or which contradicted, or challenged, or playfully mocked, whatever official narrative the global Corporatocracy was pumping out on any given day.

From 2016 to 2022, Twitter.com (which, let’s face it, is essentially a glorified listserv with ads) abandoned any pretense of editorial neutrality and regard for anything remotely resembling people’s right to freedom of speech (i.e., a fundamental principle of democratic society), and brazenly attempted to impose and enforce ideological uniformity on the platform under the guise of “keeping people safe” and “protecting the health of the public conversation.”

This metamorphosis of a social-media company into a full-blown Orwellian Ministry of Truth was just one part of “The War on Populism” that the global-capitalist ruling classes have been relentlessly waging for the last six years, which I’ve written about extensively elsewhere (e.g., in that book I just inserted a link to, and the majority of my Consent Factory essays), so I just want to focus on Twitter at the moment and get to the part where I blaspheme Musk, or don’t blaspheme him enough, and piss everyone off.

Basically, the backstory, in a nutshell, is, by circa the middle of 2021, the Twitter moderators’ censorship of views that didn’t conform to their “woke” ideology had reached the point where a lot of conservatives, and libertarians, and the approximately 15-16 old free-speech-absolutist lefties like me that still exist, were unhappy about being censored, deplatformed, “deboosted,” and demonized as “disseminators of hate speech,” “science deniers,” “election deniers,” “anti-vaxers,” “conspiracy theorists,” and an assortment of other official epithets, and were making a considerable amount of noise.

The governments that nominally regulate Twitter and other social-media platforms are owned and operated by GloboCap (i.e., the global Corporatocracy I mentioned above), which has been imposing and enforcing ideological uniformity on the entire planet for the last thirty years, so, of course, they were not going to intervene in the affairs of global corporation that is part and parcel of the Gleichschaltung campaign that they are also part and parcel of.

So, Emperor Elonicus to the rescue!

Musk, who did not get where he is by not being able to read a market, saw an opportunity and he seized it. As I’ve been going on and on and on about monotonously for the last six years, the essential conflict of our historical epoch is the multiplicitous backlash (or insurgency) against the advance of hegemonic global capitalism. I won’t go on and on about it here. The point is, at the current stage of that conflict, there is serious money to be made by marketing to the “anti-Woke” demographic, and, if Musk is a master of anything, it’s marketing.

You probably think I’m kidding. I am not. As Bill Hicks would put it if he were still around, the authoritarian anti-authoritarianism dollar is just sitting out there waiting to be harvested. “Anti-Woke” authoritarianism is the next big thing. We are talking beaucoup branding action, social media platforms, phones, you name it!

And so begins the glorious reign of Emperor Elonicus the Just, the half-man/half-god savior of Twitter, and freedom of speech, and freedom itself, selfless defender of the common man, and unrivaled practitioner of the marketing stunt!

The day before the deal was sealed, Elonicus swaggered into Twitter headquarters carrying an actual kitchen sink, tweeting “let that sink in!” to his 100 million followers, the first of a series of such stunts to follow.

The plebeians in the digital Colosseum erupted into wild applause. A frenzy of joyous hooting and hollering and “liking” and retweeting ensued. At last, a beneficent billionaire Caesar had arrived to save the Internet from Wokeness! Elonicus loyalists flooded onto Twitter, chanting the ancient Roman obeisance, “Avē Imperātor, tweetitūrī tē salūtant!”

The next day, Elonicus summarily fired Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s CEO, and took his seat upon the throne. Other “woke” heads were soon placed on spikes. Hallelujah … the bird was freed!

The Corporatocracy went absolutely apeshit. Liberal pundits rent their garments and rushed onto the Internet to histrionically denounce Elonicus the Usurper, who was going to unleash the most the stochastically-terrorist orgy of white-supremacist hate speech in the history of white-supremacist hate speech, or stochastic terrorism, or orgies, or something. Television celebrities, ageing rock musicians, bestselling philosophical podcasters, and other such influential personages began pretentiously fleeing the platform in droves, a number of them migrating to something called Mastodon, where they immediately commenced scolding and cancelling each other. Advertisers pulled their accounts. The media began a “Twitter Death Watch.” Jonathan Chait threatened to move to Canada, but then changed his mind and vowed to “stay and fight.”

Meanwhile, Elonicus, who understands a public-relations war as well as anyone, did what all good emperors do when under attack from their own patrician class. He broke out the bread and circus for the plebeians … or, all right, at least he broke out the circus.

Yes, he actually did the imperial Roman “pollice verso” shtick to decide the fate of Trumpus Maximus, and then, once the results came in, he imperiously tweeted “Vox Populi, Vox Dei”!

And now, apparently, Elonicus, in his mercy, after running another Vox Populi poll stunt, has decreed a “general amnesty” for all political prisoners (i.e., suspended Twitter accounts). It remains to be seen whether this “amnesty” extends to the countless people whose accounts were suspended for challenging the official Covid narrative, or for mentioning the fact that GloboCap is arming and funding the neo-Nazis in the Ukraine that have been carrying out its latest counterinsurgency op, but let’s not worry about minor details. Next week is going to be a celebration … a celebration of freedom, and “anti-Wokeness,” and the god-like power of Elon Musk!

All of which has been highly entertaining, but forgive me if I don’t get all worked up. For one thing, I’ve seen this movie before, the one where the handsome new charismatic sheriff (who just happens to be a major GloboCap player, or puppet, or otherwise a member of “the club”) rides into town to set things right. No matter how many I watch it, it always seems to end the same.

The other thing is … well, it’s personal. For about a year now, Twitter has been maliciously defaming my business account in order to damage my reputation and income. Twitter has been doing that by concealing my tweets — the majority, but not all, of my tweets — behind fake “age-restricted adult content” advisories. Twitter has been doing that in order to trick people into believing that I am tweeting some kind of pornography.

This rather weird tactic has been quite effective. It has definitely damaged my income as an author, and has presumably misled countless people into assuming I am some sort of sleazy pornographer posing as a political satirist. You can probably imagine how I feel about that.

Elon Musk’s Twitter did not start this, and I realize the man has a lot on his plate, but I just assumed that, after a month or so on the throne, it might have occurred to him to issue an order instructing his “freebird” staff to, you know, stop maliciously defaming people, and attempting to damage their reputations and income, because they questioned the official Covid-19 narrative, or the official Russia narrative, or the “Emperor Elonicus” narrative.

Or … I don’t know, maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe Elonicus really has come to save us from the “woke” fanatics. Maybe this is not just another iteration of the classic good cop/bad cop routine, like when Obama the Beneficient saved the world from Evil Bush and ended the War on Terror by bombing numerous countries, extrajudicially assassinating anyone he felt like, and illegally surveilling everyone, to the wild applause of millions of liberals, who had spent the previous eight years shrieking about Evil Bush doing exactly the same thing.

Because conservatives and libertarians would never fall for a con job like that, would they?

No, the Emperor Elonicus is probably going to issue that order any day now (i.e., to cease and desist from maliciously defaming people). Or I guess it might take a little longer than that. Not maliciously defaming people is probably a complicated, multi-stage process involving months of meticulous planning, like rocketing a car into outer space. One Elonicus fan, alarmed by the disrespectful tone of my repeated tweets to the Emperor, advised me to stop whining and wait one full year, which … sure, on reflection, that’s probably about right.

So, never mind, and please forgive the foregoing blasphemy. Hail Elonicus! Long may he reign!

###

CJ Hopkins
November 27, 2022
Photo: 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.

It feels like it’s finally over, doesn’t it, the whole “apocalyptic pandemic” thing? I mean, really, really over this time. Not like all those other times when you thought it was over, but it wasn’t over, and was like the end of those Alien movies, where it seems like Ripley has finally escaped, but the alien is hiding out in the shuttle, or the escape pod, or Ripley’s intestinal tract.

But this time doesn’t feel like that. This time it feels like it’s really, really over. Go out and take a look around. Hardly anyone is wearing masks anymore (except where masks are mandatory) or being coerced into submitting to “vaccinations” (except where “vaccination” is mandatory), and the hordes of hate-drunk New Normal fanatics who demanded that “the Unvaccinated” be segregated, censored, fired from their jobs, and otherwise demonized and persecuted, have all fallen silent (except for those who haven’t).

Everything is back to normal, right?

Wrong. Everything is not back to normal. Everything is absolutely New Normal. What is over is the “shock-and-awe” phase, which was never meant to go on forever. It was always only meant to get us here.

Where, you’re probably asking, is “here”? “Here” is a place where the new official ideology has been firmly established as our new “reality,” woven into the fabric of normal everyday life. No, not everywhere, just everywhere that matters. (Do you really think the global-capitalist ruling classes care what people in Lakeland, Florida, Elk River, Idaho, or some village in Sicily believe about “reality”?) Yes, most government restrictions have been lifted, mainly because they are no longer necessary, but in centers of power throughout the West, in political, corporate, and cultural spheres, in academia, the mainstream media, and so on, the New Normal has become “reality,” or, in other words, “just the way it is,” which is the ultimate goal of every ideology.

For example, I just happened upon this “important COVID-19 information,” which you need to be aware of (and strictly adhere to) if you want to attend a performance at this Off-Broadway theater in New York City, where “everything is back to normal.”

I could pull up countless further examples, but I don’t want to waste your time. At this point, it isn’t the mask and “vaccination” mandates themselves that are important. They are simply the symbols and rituals of the new official ideology, an ideology that has divided societies into two irreconcilable categories of people: (1) those who are prepared to conform their beliefs to the official narrative of the day, no matter how blatantly ridiculous it is, and otherwise click heels and follow the orders of the global-capitalist ruling establishment, no matter how destructive and fascistic they may be; and (2) those who are not prepared to do that.

Let’s go ahead and call them “Normals” and “Deviants.” I think you know which one you are.

This division of society into two opposing and irreconcilable classes of people cuts across and supersedes old political lines. There are Normals and Deviants on both the Left and the Right. The global-capitalist ruling establishment couldn’t care less whether you are a “progressive,” or a “conservative,” or a “libertarian,” or an “anarchist,” or whatever you call yourself. What they care about is whether you’re a Normal or a Deviant. What they care about is whether you will follow orders. What they care about is whether you are conforming your perceptions and behavior and thinking to their new “reality” … the hegemonic global-capitalist “reality” that has been gradually evolving for the last 30 years and is now entering its totalitarian stage.

I’ve been writing about the evolution of global capitalism in my essays since 2016 — and since the early 1990s in my stage plays — so I’m not going to reiterate the whole story here. Readers who have just tuned into my political satire and commentary during the last two years can go back and read the essays in Trumpocalypse (2016-2017) and The War on Populism (2018-2019).

The short version is, back in 2016, GloboCap was rolling along, destabilizing, restructuring, and privatizing the planet that it came into sole unchallenged possession of when the Soviet Union finally collapsed, and everything was hunky-dory, and then along came Brexit, Donald Trump, and the whole “populist” and neo-nationalist rebellion against globalism throughout the West. So, GloboCap needed to deal with that, which is what is has been doing for last six years … yes, the last six — not just two and a half — years.

The War on Dissent didn’t start with Covid and it isn’t going to end with Covid. GloboCap (or “the Corporatocracy” if you prefer) has been delegitimizing, demonizing, and disappearing dissent and increasingly imposing ideological uniformity on Western society since 2016. The New Normal is just the latest stage of it. Once it gets done quashing this “populist” rebellion and imposing ideological uniformity on urban society throughout the West, it will go back to destabilizing, restructuring, and privatizing the rest of the world, which is what it was doing with the “War on Terror” (and other “democracy”-promoting projects) from 2001 to 2016.

The goal of this global Gleichschaltung campaign is the goal of every totalitarian system, i.e., to render any and all deviance from its official ideology pathological. The nature of the deviance does not matter. The official ideology does not matter. (GloboCap has no fixed ideology. It can abruptly change its official “reality” from day to day, as we have experienced recently). What matters is one’s willingness or unwillingness to conform to whatever the official “reality” is, regardless of how ridiculous it is, and how many times it has been disproved, and sometimes even acknowledged as fiction by the very authorities who nonetheless continue to assert its “reality.”

I’ll give you one more concrete example.

After I happened upon the “Covid restrictions” (i.e., the social-segregation system) still being enforced by that Off-Broadway theater, I stumbled upon this article in Current Affairs about the oracle Yuval Noah Harari, the writer of which article mentions in passing that somewhere between 6 million and 12 million people have “died of Covid,” as if this were a fact, a fact that no one in their right mind would question. Which it is, officially, in our new “reality,” despite the fact (i.e., the actual fact) that — as even the “health authorities” have admitted — anyone who died of anything in a hospital after testing positive was recorded as a “Covid-19 death.”

This is how “reality” (i.e., official “reality,” consensus “reality”) is manufactured and policed. It is manufactured and policed, not only by the media, corporations, governments, and non-governmental governing entities, but also (and, ultimately, more effectively) by the constant repetition of official narratives as unquestionable axiomatic facts.

In our brave new totalitarian global-capitalist “reality,” anyone who questions or challenges such “facts” immediately renders oneself a “Deviant” and is excommunicated from “Normal” society. Seriously, just for fun, try to get a job at a corporation, or a university, or a part in a movie or a Broadway play, or a book deal, or a research grant, etc., while being honest about your beliefs about Covid. Or, if you’re a “respectable” journalist, you know, with literary and public-speaking agents, and book deals, and personal managers, and so on, go ahead, report the facts (i.e., the actual facts, which you know are there, but which you have been avoiding like the plague for the last two years), and watch your career get violently sucked down the drain like a turd in an airplane toilet.

That last bit was meant for “urban professionals,” who still have careers, or are aspiring to careers, or are otherwise still invested in remaining members in good standing of “Normal” society, i.e., not you folks in Florida and Idaho, or my fellow literary and artistic “Deviants.”

We have pretty much burned our bridges at this point. Unless you’re prepared to mindfuck yourself, and gaslight yourself, and confess, and convert, there’s no going back to “normal” society (which we couldn’t go back to anyway, on account of how it doesn’t exist anymore).

I realize that a lot of folks have probably been looking forward to that … to the day when the Normals finally “wake up” and face the facts, and truth prevails, and we return to something resembling normality. It’s not going to happen. We’re not going back. The Normals are never going to “wake up.” Because they’re not asleep. They’re not hypnotized. They’re not going to “come to their senses” one day and take responsibility for the damage they have done. Sure, they will apologize for their “mistakes,” and admit that possibly they “overreacted,” but the official narrative of the Covid pandemic and the new “reality” it has ushered into being will remain in force, and they will defend both with their lives.

Or, rather, they will defend both with our lives.

If you think I’m being hyperbolic, well, consider the epithets GloboCap has conditioned the Normals to use to demonize us … “conspiracy theorist,” “science denier,” “insurrectionist,” “extremist,” “violent domestic terrorist.” None of which signify a political ideology or any political or critical position whatsoever. They signify deviation from the norm. Any type of deviation from the norm. They are tactical terms, devoid of meaning, designed to erase the political character of the diverse opposition to global-capitalism (or “globalism,” if you are touchy about the word “capitalism”), to lump us all into one big bucket of “deviance.”

It is usually not a very good omen when nations — or totally unaccountable, supranational global-power systems — suddenly break out the “deviance bucket.” It is usually a sign that things are going to get ugly, ugly in a totalitarian fashion, which is precisely what has been happening for the past six years.

Back in July of 2021, at the height of the fascistic New Normal hate frenzy, with the military enforcing “Covid restrictions,” a global segregation system being implemented, and people threatening to decapitate me for refusing to get “vaccinated,” I published a piece called The Road to Totalitarianism. We are still on that road. Both the Normals and we Deviants. We’ve been on that road for quite some time, longer than most of us probably realize. The weather has improved, slightly. The scenery out the window has changed. The destination has not. I haven’t seen any exits. Let me know if you do, will you?

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CJ Hopkins
November 13, 2022
Photo: W. Rospondek, Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp

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.

For students of official propaganda, mind control, emotional coercion, and other insidious manipulation techniques, the rollout of the New Normal has been a bonanza. Never before have we been able to observe the application and effects of these powerful technologies in real-time on such a massive scale.

In a little over two and a half years, our collective “reality” has been radically revised. Our societies have been radically restructured. Millions (probably billions) of people have been systematically conditioned to believe a variety of patently ridiculous assertions, assertions based on absolutely nothing, repeatedly disproved by widely available evidence, but which have nevertheless attained the status of facts. An entire fictitious history has been written based on those baseless and ridiculous assertions. It will not be unwritten easily or quickly.

I am not going to waste your time debunking those assertions. They have been repeatedly, exhaustively debunked. You know what they are and you either believe them or you don’t. Either way, reviewing and debunking them again isn’t going to change a thing.

Instead, I want to focus on one particularly effective mind-control technology, one that has done a lot of heavy lifting throughout the implementation of the New Normal and is doing a lot of heavy-lifting currently. I want to do that because many people mistakenly believe that mind-control is either (a) a “conspiracy theory” or (b) something that can only be achieved with drugs, microwaves, surgery, torture, or some other invasive physical means. Of course, there is a vast and well-documented history of the use of such invasive physical technologies (see, e.g., the history of the CIA’s infamous MKULTRA program), but in many instances mind-control can be achieved through much less elaborate techniques.

One of the most basic and effective techniques that cults, totalitarian systems, and individuals with fascistic personalities use to disorient and control people’s minds is “gaslighting.” You’re probably familiar with the term. If not, here are a few definitions:

“the manipulation of another person into doubting their perceptions, experiences, or understanding of events.” American Psychological Association

“an insidious form of manipulation and psychological control. Victims of gaslighting are deliberately and systematically fed false information that leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves. They may end up doubting their memory, their perception, and even their sanity.” Psychology Today

“a form of psychological manipulation in which the abuser attempts to sow self-doubt and confusion in their victim’s mind. Typically, gaslighters are seeking to gain power and control over the other person, by distorting reality and forcing them to question their own judgment and intuition.” Newport Institute

The main goal of gaslighting is to confuse, coerce, and emotionally manipulate your victim into abandoning their own perception of reality and accepting whatever new “reality” you impose on them. Ultimately, you want to completely destroy their ability to trust their own perception, emotions, reasoning, and memory of historical events, and render them utterly dependent on you to tell them what is real and what “really” happened, and so on, and how they should be feeling about it.

Anyone who has ever experienced gaslighting in the context of an abusive relationship, or a cult, or a totalitarian system, or who has worked in a battered women’s shelter, can tell you how powerful and destructive it is. In the most extreme cases, the victims of gaslighting are entirely stripped of their sense of self and surrender their individual autonomy completely. Among the best-known and most dramatic examples are the Patty Hearst case, Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, the Manson family, and various other cults, but, the truth is, gaslighting happens every day, out of the spotlight of the media, in countless personal and professional relationships.

Since the Spring of 2020, we have been subjected to official gaslighting on an unprecedented scale. In a sense, the “Apocalyptic Pandemic” PSYOP has been one big extended gaslighting campaign (comprising countless individual instances of gaslighting) inflicted on the masses throughout the world. The events of this past week were just another example.

Basically, what happened was, a Pfizer executive confirmed to the European Parliament last Monday that Pfizer did not know whether its Covid “vaccine” prevented transmission of the virus before it was promoted as doing exactly that and forced on the masses in December of 2020. People saw the video of the executive admitting this, or heard about it, and got upset. They tweeted and Facebooked and posted videos of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, Bill Gates, the Director of the CDC, official propagandists like Rachel Maddow, and various other “experts” and “authorities” blatantly lying to the public, promising people that getting “vaccinated” would “prevent transmission,” “protect other people from infection,” “stop the virus in its tracks,” and so on, which totally baseless assertions (i.e., lies) were the justification for the systematic segregation and persecution of “the Unvaccinated,” and the fomenting of mass fanatical hatred of anyone challenging the official “vaccine” narrative, and the official New Normal ideology, which hatred persists to this very day.

The New Normal propaganda apparatus (i.e., the corporate media, health “experts,” et al.) responded to the story predictably. They ignored it, hoping it would just go away. When it didn’t, they rolled out the “fact-checkers” (i.e., gaslighters).

The Associated Press, Reuters, PolitiFact, and other official gaslighting outfits immediately published lengthy official “fact-checks” that would make a sophist blush. Read them and you will see what I mean. They are perfect examples of official gaslighting, crafted to distract you from the point and suck you into an argument over meaningless details and definitions. They sound exactly like Holocaust deniers pathetically asserting that there is no written proof that Hitler ordered the Final Solution … which, there isn’t, but it doesn’t fucking matter. Of course Hitler ordered the Final Solution, and of course they lied about the “vaccines.”

The Internet is swimming with evidence of their lies … tweets, videos, articles, and so on.

Which is what makes gaslighting so frustrating for people who believe they are engaged in an actual good-faith argument over facts and the truth. But that’s not how totalitarianism works. The New Normals, when they repeat whatever the authorities have instructed them to repeat today (e.g., “trust the Science,” “safe and effective,” “no one ever claimed they would prevent transmission”), could not care less whether it is actually true, or even if it makes the slightest sense.

These gaslighting “fact-checks” are not meant to convince them that anything is true or false. And they are certainly not meant to convince us. They are official scripts, talking points, and thought-terminating clichés for the New Normals to repeat, like cultists chanting mantras at you to shut off their minds and block out anything that contradicts or threatens the “reality” of the cult.

You can present them with the actual facts, and they will smile knowingly, and deny them to your face, and condescendingly mock you for not “seeing the truth.”

You can show the New Normals the video, and they will watch it, and then look you right in the eye and deny it. pic.twitter.com/iLWsS7jl0f https://t.co/JJTuhGViya

— Consent Factory (@consent_factory) October 13, 2022

But here’s the tricky thing about gaslighting.

In order to effectively gaslight someone, you have be in a position of authority or wield some other form of power over them. They have to need something vital from you (i.e., sustenance, safety, financial security, community, career advancement, or just love). You can’t walk up to some random stranger on the street and start gaslighting them. They will laugh in your face.

The reason the New Normal authorities have been able to gaslight the masses so effectively is that most of the masses do need something from them … a job, food, shelter, money, security, status, their friends, a relationship, or whatever it is they’re not willing to risk by challenging those in power and their lies. Gaslighters, cultists, and power freaks, generally, know this. It is what they depend on, your unwillingness to live without whatever it is. They zero in on it and threaten you with the loss of it (sometimes consciously, sometimes just intuitively).

Gaslighting won’t work if you are willing to give up whatever the gaslighter is threatening to take from you (or stop giving you, as the case may be), but you have to be willing to actually lose it, because you will be punished for defending yourself, for not surrendering your autonomy and integrity, and conforming to the “reality” of the cult, or the abusive relationship, or the totalitarian system.

I have described the New Normal (i.e., our new “reality”) as pathologized-totalitarianism, and as a “a cult writ large, on a societal scale.” I used the “Covidian Cult” analogy because every totalitarian system essentially operates like a cult, the main difference being that, in totalitarian systems, the balance of power between the cult and the normal (i.e., dominant) society is completely inverted. The cult becomes the dominant (i.e., “normal”) society, and non-cult-members become its “deviants.”

We do not want to see ourselves as “deviants” (because we haven’t changed, the society has), and our instinct is to reject the label, but that is exactly what we are … deviants. People who deviate from the norm, a new norm, which we reject, and oppose, but which, despite that, is nonetheless the norm, and thus we are going to be regarded and dealt with like deviants.

I am such a deviant. I have a feeling you are too. Under the circumstances, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, we need to accept it, and embrace it. Above all, we need to get clear about it, about where we stand in this new “reality.”

We are heading toward New Normal Winter No. 3. They are already cranking up the official propaganda, jacking up the fabricated “cases,” talking about reintroducing mask-mandates, fomenting mass hatred of “the Unvaccinated,” and so on. People’s gas bills and doubling and tripling. The global-capitalist ruling classes are openly embracing neo-Nazis. There is talk of “limited” nuclear war. Fanaticism, fear, and hatred abound. The gaslighting of the masses is not abating. It is increasing. The suppression of dissent is intensifying. The demonization of non-conformity is intensifying. Lines are being drawn in the sand. You see it and feel it just like I do.

Get clear on what’s essential to you. Get clear about what you’re willing to lose. Stay deviant. Stay frosty. This isn’t over.

CJ Hopkins
October 16, 2022
Photo: BBC History Revealed

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 staff 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.

This is the weirdest part of the PSYOP. It’s like the morning after an office party on which you wake up almost terminally hungover to hazy memories of having performed a Tequila-fuelled blowjob on Bob in Accounting in what was either the 9th Floor Reception Area or possibly the downstairs lobby of your building while someone vaguely resembling that smirking kid in the Mail Room filmed it on his phone.

Yes, it’s the Morning After … that revolting regurgitant chorus you’re hearing is the sound of millions of Covidian Cultists down on their knees in their gender-neutral bathrooms praying to the Porcelain God.

It has been quite a trip these last two and a half years, but the orgy of fear and hatred is over, the mass hysteria is wearing off, and the reality of the damage they have done is beginning to become undeniable.

Countless thousands of people have been killed, seriously injured, and permanently disabled, victims of experimental “vaccines” they did not need but were coerced into taking. Societies have been torn apart, economies crippled, institutions discredited, democratic precepts like the rule of law and constitutional rights made mockeries of themselves, friends and families turned against each other, and so on, and the dust hasn’t even settled yet. It will take many years to assess the damage … or, rather, to recontextualize, rationalize, deny, and memory-hole the damage (while simultaneously “normalizing” the fascistic biosecurity dystopia the damage made it possible to implement).

This process is now well underway. As I’m sure you’ve noticed over the past several months, governments, global health authorities, the corporate and state media, the culture industry, and other key components of “The New Normal Reich” have been quietly phasing out their “Covid restrictions,” rewriting “The Science,” rewriting history (i.e., the science and history they had previously rewritten), executing limited hangouts, and otherwise transitioning the masses out of “emergency” mode and into the New Normal.

In other words, everything is going to plan.

You can’t keep people whipped up into a state of full-blown hysteria indefinitely. When you’re radically destabilizing and restructuring a society, you hit them hard with the Shock-and-Awe for a few weeks, or months (or years in this case), and then you gently ease them into the new “reality.” Which, after being systematically terrorized, gaslighted, threatened, and otherwise tormented for however long you did that to them, they’ll be grateful for anything resembling “normality,” no matter how fascistic it turns out to be.

You have to be delicate executing this phase, in which the vast majority of the masses, having forced themselves to believe whatever you needed them to believe during the Shock-and-Awe phase, have to force themselves to believe they never believed whatever you needed them to believe then, and believe whatever you need them to believe now, which typically completely contradicts whatever they had previously forced themselves to believe (and actually, literally, believed) in a desperate attempt to keep you happy, so that maybe you would eventually stop beating on them, and relentlessly gaslighting and terrorizing them.

Now, a lot people seem to be having trouble understanding or accepting this fact, i.e., the fact that human beings are capable of forcing themselves to believe whatever they need to believe in order to survive or remain in good standing with “normal” society (or whatever social body they are members of and depend on to meet their basic needs). Not pretend to believe, literally believe, the way that religious converts believe, the way we believe whatever we believe today that we didn’t believe ten years ago.

I must say, I find it rather baffling, people’s lack of understanding and acceptance of this fact, as this capability is a fundamental human attribute that has been documented, over and over, throughout the course of human history. It is not some “theory” I just made up. It is how we maintain social cohesion. It is how we socialize our children. It is how armies and university departments work. It is basic part of how social bodies function; conformity is rewarded and non-conformity is punished. There’s nothing new about this phenomenon. People have been conforming to new official “realities” and making themselves believe whatever they have to believe to survive within them for approximately five thousand years.

It is, however, a rare occasion when we are able to observe the process this clearly. It usually takes place more or less invisibly within the context of normal everyday life. It is only during sudden radical shifts from one “reality” to another “reality” that we can watch people force themselves to believe whatever they perceive they need to believe, or are instructed by their rulers to believe, in order to survive and thrive in society (e.g., cult indoctrinations, religious conversions, the outbreak of war, physical torture, or in the wake of political revolutions).

This is what we’ve been watching since March 2020, not mass hypnosis, or mass formation psychosis, but the masses forcing themselves to believe whatever they sensed they needed to believe (or were instructed by the authorities to believe) in order to remain parts of “normal” society and not be demonized by their governments and the media, ostracized by their friends and family, fired from their jobs, segregated, censored, beaten and arrested by the police, and otherwise punished for non-conformity as a new “reality” was manufactured and imposed on societies throughout the world.

And now their “reality” is changing again, or “The Science is evolving,” or whatever, and the absurdities they forced themselves to believe are being exposed as … well, as absurdities, and their fanatical and often fascistic behavior, as it turns out, was based on absolutely nothing.

Many of them couldn’t care less, as their behavior was never “based” on anything other than going along with the herd, and so they have simply transitioned from fanatically hating “the Unvaccinated” to fanatically hating “the Russians,” and fanatically supporting Ukrainian neo-Nazis, and fanatically doing whatever else the GloboCap puppets on their televisions instruct them to fanatically do. However, a significant number of them have retained enough of their critical faculties that being yanked back and forth from “reality” to “reality” is causing them to experience mild cognitive dissonance, and confusion, and shame, or borderline psychosis.

Believe it or not, my heart goes out to them … these formerly fanatical Covidian Cultists that wanted me segregated from society, and silenced, and locked up in an internment camp. I cannot make it easier for them by pretending they didn’t do what they did (and in too many cases are still actively doing), or pretending they were hypnotized, or in some other altered state of consciousness, while they did what they did for the past two and half years, but just imagine how they must be feeling now that the party is finally over and the brutal morning after has arrived.

Imagine realizing at this late stage of things that everything you believed, thought, and said, the incalculable harm you have done to people, and to society, was never about a pandemic, but was always about conditioning the masses to respond to fear, coercion, and control like some global Pavlovian behavioral experiment. Or just take it from actress Jennifer Gibson …

Canadian actress Jennifer Gibson. pic.twitter.com/4FsC5ndfAp

— D. Scott @eclipsethis2003 (@eclipsethis2003) September 29, 2022

And now comes the really nauseating part, the part where the New Normal authorities admit that they “overreacted,” and that “mistakes were made,” and that they deeply regret having needlessly murdered and seriously injured God knows how many people, and psychologically crippled countless children, and accidentally totally destabilized and restructured the entire global economy, and explain in a lengthy piece in The New Yorker how they’re sorry, but they were drunk at the time, and swear they will never do it again.

You remember this part from 2004 after the invasion and occupation of Iraq when the photos of Abu Ghraib were published, and the American masses who had been hooting and hollering and waving American flags around, and calling people “ragheads” and “sand niggers,” and so on, had to stare themselves and their war crimes in the face.

You recall how the Americans dealt with their shame. That’s right, they reelected George Bush and carried on murdering and torturing Iraqis, and Afghans, and assorted other brown people, and hooting and hollering “we’re number one,” and waving American flags around, because in for a penny, in for a pound.

You see, another fundamental human attribute (in addition to our ability to force ourselves to believe whatever we need to believe in order to survive and thrive in society) is that we don’t tend to deal with shame very well. We tend to repress it and react aggressively to anyone who tries to force us to face it. If you don’t believe me, ask anyone you know who has been (or still is) in an abusive relationship. Ask them how their abuser reacts when they try to get them to take responsibility for their abusive behavior.

I can’t tell you exactly what’s going to happen over the coming months, but I told you back in January that there was going to be wailing and gnashing of teeth, and wailing and gnashing of teeth there has been, and there is certainly going to be a lot more of it … and probably not just wailing and gnashing. This is just the dawn of the Morning After. I have a feeling we ain’t seen nothing yet.

CJ Hopkins
October 3, 2022
Photo: Jennifer Gibson

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 staff 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, gosh, this is kind of embarrassing. For approximately the last two and a half years, I have been documenting, analyzing, and occasionally satirizing the so-called “New Normal,” i.e., the new, pathologized, official ideology that has been rolled out all across the planet by the global-capitalist ruling classes under the pretext of combating an apocalyptic pandemic … or at least that’s what I thought was going on.

As it turns out, I was totally wrong.

Apparently, the global-capitalist ruling establishment (or “GloboCap,” as I often refer to the unaccountable, supranational network of global corporations, banks, governments, and non-governmental governing entities that unaccountably govern our world) has not been rolling out a new official ideology, or pathologized form of totalitarianism, or not intentionally in any event.

No one has been methodically gaslighting anyone, or terrorizing anyone with propaganda, or censoring or segregating anyone, or coercing anyone to get needlessly “vaccinated” with any sort of dangerous experimental drugs, or consciously conspiring with anyone to do anything.

Everyone has simply been suffering from Mass Formation Hypnosis Disorder!

I know, you probably find this hard to believe, especially because I have been making precisely the opposite case for over two years now, but I saw it on the Alex Jones show! Mattias Desmet, a professor from Belgium, and “the world’s leading expert” on this new disorder, explained it all in meticulous detail.

According to Desmet, the way this disorder works is, people feel “lonely and isolated,” which makes them feel angry, but they don’t have anything or anyone to unleash their anger on, so they form a mass and hypnotize each other, and invent a new fanatical ideology that they all fanatically hypnotically believe in, which, at that point, their rulers, who are also hypnotized, have no choice but to go full-totalitarian, and hypnotize everyone even more, because that is what the hypnotized mass demands, so that they can finally unleash their anger on someone, i.e., those who have managed to avoid being hypnotized (one assumes with some special anti-hypnosis technology, but I don’t think Professor Desmet explained that part).

And, OK, before you hypnosis deniers start sending me emails denying the power of hypnosis to totally totalitarianize society, listen to Professor Desmet explain how surgeons in Belgium are routinely performing open-heart surgery on hypnotized patients without any anesthetic whatsoever! They just saw right through their breastbones with a sternum saw, ratchet open their rib cages with a sternal retractor, and start slicing into the patients’ hearts … and these patients don’t even flinch or anything! He has witnessed this with his own two eyes!

Or, all right, it seems he hasn’t actually witnessed this with his own two eyes. It seems he was actually just lying when he said that, which he confessed to in a lengthy Facebook post (after people pointed out that he had lied) in which he publicly wondered why he had lied, and then rationalized his lie with various excuses, and posted several misleading links in an attempt to suggest that he hadn’t actually lied, despite the fact that he had just admitted he did, and just generally tried to muddy the waters with a lot of awkward psychobabble.

But I don’t mean to cast aspersions. Professor Desmet is, after all, “the world’s leading expert” on “Mass Formation Psychosis” or simply “Mass Formation” or whatever you want to call this fairy tale that he and others have been peddling, not just on clown shows like Alex Jones’, but to massive audiences like Tucker Carlson’s …

Seriously now, I have been aware of Desmet’s theory for some time, but I had mostly held my tongue about it because (a) I considered it relatively harmless, and (b) I’m generally reluctant to tear another vocal opponent of the New Normal a new asshole. We get enough of that from the New Normal “fact checkers.” However, unfortunately, this “mass hypnosis” gibberish has gained enough traction that it has now become dangerous, so I need to do a little new-asshole-tearing. (Fanatical fans of Professor Desmet will probably want to navigate away at this point.)

Ready? OK, here we go.

What we’ve been experiencing for the past two and a half years — and arguably the last six and a half years — is not the result of “mass hypnosis.” The global-capitalist ruling establishment is destabilizing and restructuring societies, globally. The people that staged and published this photograph in January 2020 and lied to the masses about the Covid death rate (i.e., 3.4%) a few months later were not mass-hypnotized. They knew what they were doing.

Likewise, the people who went New Normal (i.e., the vast majority of most societies) were not “mass hypnotized” or in some kind of trance. They were simply looking out for themselves by conforming to the new official “reality.” This is standard behavior in totalitarian systems, and cults, and even non-totalitarian systems. I explained it this way in a recent interview …

“Totalitarianism can be imposed on any society if the government, or whatever structure rules it, controls the essential elements of power (i.e., the military, the police, the media, the culture industry, etc.). Once the transition to totalitarianism begins, you can count on roughly two thirds of the society either embracing it or acquiescing to it, not because they are in some vulnerable psychological state, but rather because they correctly perceive which way the wind is blowing and they don’t want to challenge the totalitarian regime and be punished for doing so. They are not hypnotized or under any other kind of spell. It’s pure survival instinct. … Not to put too fine a point on it, but most people are either perfectly content to conform to whatever type of society those in power impose on them as long as their basic needs are met, or they are not content [to do so], but they are cowards, so they stand by in silence. I don’t mean that as a judgment or an insult. Cowardice and the ability to abandon one’s principles (or not having any principles in the first place) are very positive traits to have if your goal is survival. When a society goes totalitarian or is otherwise occupied and radically transformed, it’s the rebels and dissidents who get lined up against the wall and shot, not the cowards and collaborators.”

I realize how harsh that sounds. It’s meant to, and at the same time, it isn’t. We are, all of us, capable of such cowardice and betrayal of our fundamental principles, given the right set of circumstances. Everyone has a breaking point. If you haven’t experienced yours yet … well, I hope you never do.

The point is, we are dealing with questions of power, not a psychological condition. Desmet’s theory pathologizes the political essence of totalitarianism, just like the official New Normal narrative pathologizes and displaces its political character, rendering it immune to political opposition, and rendering its opponents “conspiracy theorists,” or “paranoid,” or otherwise divorced from “reality,” thus stripping us of political legitimacy.

In this “Mass Formation” fairy tale, the political conflict disappears. The totalitarian system and those who resist it are replaced by a psychiatrist and a psychiatric patient. In this story, there is no one and nothing to fight. We just need to find a “cure” or a “treatment” for this bizarre new psychiatric disorder that keeps causing the masses to hypnotize each other and invent some new fanatical totalitarian ideology in order to alleviate the pent-up frustration caused by their loneliness and isolation by unleashing their rage on unhypnotized persons!

Or whatever … maybe I don’t understand the nuances of “Mass Formation” theory. I’m not a professional psychologist or anything. I’m sure one or two of Professor Desmet’s fans will be happy to explain it all to me, if they’re not too busy undergoing open-heart surgery without anesthetic. I wouldn’t want to interfere with that!

CJ Hopkins
September 11, 2022
Photos: InfoWars; Twitter; FOX News; The Guardian

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 staff up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian sci-fi novel, Zone 23, or Volumes I, II, and III of his Consent Factory Essays, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, feel free to contact him directly.

So, the censorship of my latest book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021), continues. Amazon.com has now banned the book in three countries … Germany, Austria, and The Netherlands.

The pretext the Amazon Content Review Team has cited as grounds for banning the book is the semi-visible swastika on the cover. This pretext is clearly a pretext, i.e., a lie, as Amazon sells a number of other products displaying semi-visible swastikas in these markets.

For example, William Shirer’s books, or Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, as depicted in the images above. Some of the swastika-displaying products Amazon offers in these markets display not merely semi-visible swastikas, but totally-visible swastikas on their packaging.

For example …

So, the Amazon Content Review Team’s pretext for banning the book is clearly a lie, and not even a convincing lie. But then Amazon doesn’t have to lie convincingly.

When you are an unaccountable supranational corporation founded and executive-chaired by Jeff Bezos, the second-richest person in the world, and a component of the US Intelligence Community, the “rule of law” does not apply to you. You do not have to justify your actions to any court of law or regulatory body, much less to some mid-list author whose income and reputation you are maliciously damaging.

Sure, there are constitutional protections against censorship and discrimination, and other laws that ostensibly forbid you from maliciously damaging the reputations and incomes of mid-list authors like me. For example:

Article 5 of the Grundgesetz (i.e., Germany’s constitution):

“Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing, and pictures and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by means of broadcasts and films shall be guaranteed. There shall be no censorship.”

Article 3 of the Grundgesetz:

“No person shall be favoured or disfavoured because of sex, parentage, race, language, homeland and origin, faith or religious or political opinions.”

But these laws do not apply to you, not when you’re Amazon.com, because you know that: (a) the governments in question, i.e., the governments of Germany, Austria, and The Netherlands, condone your violations of their constitutions (which they have abrogated in any event under the pretext of a “public health emergency”) and might have even had something to do with them, i.e., your constitutional violations; and (b) lawyers will be too afraid of your wealth and power to challenge you in court.

Moreover, mainstream journalists will completely ignore your censorship of political literature that does not conform to the new official global-capitalist ideology, or they will “like” or retweet one of my tweets, and then rush back to covering whatever one of their colleagues tweeted about some other colleague’s tweet, and their colleagues’ responses to that tweet, i.e., the tweet about the original tweet, because they, i.e., the mainstream journalists, are also scared shitless of incurring your ire, and potentially getting their books banned by Amazon, and their incomes and reputations damaged, and getting fired by their literary agents, and so on.

Which means you can pretty much do whatever you want to anyone you want, which is a pretty sweet deal if you’re an immensely powerful supranational corporation that dominates book sales and distribution globally and is also an essential component of the global-capitalist Intelligence Community.

Which that is kind of the point of this piece. Yes, Amazon’s banning of my book will damage my book sales and reputation as an author, but I’ll survive. The point is, as I put it in a post I published yesterday, before Amazon advised me that they had banned the book in Austria and The Netherlands, in addition to Germany:

“What is important is that corporations like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. (which control our communication networks) do not have the slightest qualms about censoring information, banning books, suppressing facts, spreading disinformation, and generally behaving like Orwellian Thoughtpolice … and we are gradually becoming accustomed to it. It is becoming “normal,” boring even. I don’t know about you, but I am not OK with living in a world where Amazon and other unaccountable global corporations decide which books we are allowed to read, which films we are allowed to watch, which facts we are allowed to know about. And that is where we are headed, currently. We’re not going to arrive there suddenly, one day. We’re going to arrive there just like this … little step by little step, one little act of corporate censorship at a time.”

I don’t know how to fight this, exactly … not my book ban, the larger phenomenon. It probably has to start with mainstream journalists and lawyers taking on these global corporations. Relatively obscure little literary outlaws (like me) do not have the juice to do it.

So, if you happen to know any people like that …

Oh, and, for those of you who enjoy seeing how the ideological-sausage gets made, here, for the purpose of criticism and review, is my recent correspondence with the Amazon Content Review Team.

August 29, 2022 (4:35 PM)

Hello,

During our review process, we found that your book’s cover image contains content (i.e. Swastika, Reichsadler, Sowilō) that is in violation of our content guidelines for Germany and may infringe German law. As a result, we will not be offering the following book for sale in Germany:

The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021)
ASIN: B0B1VCK39P, 3982146429

You may reply to this message if you believe this decision has been made in error.

Our content guidelines are published on the Kindle Direct Publishing website: https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A2TOZW0SV7IR1U.

Best regards,

Amazon KDP

Content Review Team
Amazon Content Review Team

August 29, 2022 (5:18 PM)

Dear Amazon KDP Content Review Team,

German law is clear on the banned/permitted use of images of swastikas. See, e.g., this Deutsche Welle article …

Swastikas and other banned symbols can displayed in Germany if they are used for “civic education, countering anti-constitutional activities, art and science, research and education, the coverage of historic and current events, or similar purposes,” according to the Criminal Code.

There are numerous examples of books, films, artworks, etc. containing swastikas for the above-cited purposes in Germany.

The cover artwork of my book (which has been on sale throughout the world since May 2022, and was an Amazon bestseller in several countries upon its release) clearly falls under such exceptional use under German law, therefore, there is no legal ground for Amazon to ban its sale or otherwise censor it.

Additionally, Amazon.de offers for sale other products bearing images of swastikas, e.g., William Shirer’s books, a Quentin Tarantino film, etc. Thus, your decision to ban my book can only be seen as arbitrary, rather than as the result of a consistent in-house policy.

Moreover, Amazon’s banning of my book violates Germany’s constitutional protection of freedom of expression as set forth in Article 5 of the Grundgesetz:

Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing, and pictures and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by means of broadcasts and films shall be guaranteed. There shall be no censorship.

I trust you have taken this decision based on your misunderstanding of German law and lack of awareness of the other books and products Amazon offers in Germany that also contain images of swastikas for the above-cited purposes, and not based on any political or ideological bias and/or intention to damage my income and reputation as an author. Thus, I assume you will immediately reverse this ban.

I look forward to your prompt reply.

Yours sincerely,
CJ Hopkins

August 30, 2022 (3:07 PM)

Hello,

Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

We need a little time to look into the problem.

We’ll reply and send you more information within 2-3 business days.

Thanks for your patience.

Content Review Team
Amazon Content Review Team

August 30, 2022 (6:24 PM)

Hello,

Thanks for your email.

We’ve reviewed your book “The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021)” (ASIN:B0B1VCK39P, 3982146429 ), and found that it is in violation of our content guidelines and we will not be offering this title for sale on Amazon.

We reserve the right to determine whether content provides a poor customer experience and remove that content from sale.

You can find our KDP content guidelines, here: https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/G200672390

Thanks for your understanding.

Best regards,
Amazon KDP

Content Review Team
Amazon Content Review Team

August 30, 2022 (6:39 PM)

Hi Amazon Content Review Team,

Could you please clarify:

(1) in which countries Amazon KDP has banned and/or is planning to ban the book;

(2) the nature of the “poor customer experience” you have cited, or which specific “content guidelines” the book violates?

I would note that the book has overwhelmingly positive reader reviews from readers all around the world, so I am unclear as to which customers are having a “poor experience.”

With kind regards,
CJ Hopkins

August 31, 2022 (9:38 AM)

Hello,

During our review process, we found that your book’s cover image contains content (i.e. Swastika) that is in violation of our content guidelines for Germany and may infringe German law.

As a result, we will not be offering the following book for sale in Germany, Netherlands and Austria:

“The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent > Factory
Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021)” (ASIN:B0B1VCK39P, 3982146429 )

Regarding the Paperback version “The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent > Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021)” (ASIN: 3982146429) KDP Print availability may not always align with digital availability.

For European countries sales, in order for a KDP paperback title to be available in one European country, you must make the book(s) available in all European countries.

If your book(s) is not in the public domain, or you don’t have publishing rights in any one of those countries, then none of the European countries should be selected as territories.

For a list of European countries, visit Help: https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/G201834280

If you have additional questions, please reply to this email.

You may reply to this message if you believe this decision has been made in error.

Our content guidelines are published on the Kindle Direct Publishing website: https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A2TOZW0SV7IR1U.

Best regards,

Thanks for using Amazon KDP

Content Review Team
Amazon Content Review Team

August 31, 2022 (1:31 PM)

Dear Amazon Content Review Team,

Thank you very much for clarifying in which countries you have arbitrarily decided to ban my book, clearly for political/ideological reasons, as you offer several other products containing “content (i.e. Swastika)” that you falsely claim is “in violation of [y]our content guidelines for Germany and may infringe German law” (referenced in my previous email).

I especially appreciated your failure to address my explication of German law regarding the permitted use of swastikas for certain purposes, and your robotic repetition of the phrase “may infringe German law,” as if I had not explained it (i.e., German law) to you. That was a lovely touch. It radiates Faceless Unaccountable Power, which I assume was what you were going for, so kudos!

Your refusal to explain the nature of the “poor customer experience” that you claimed customers have experienced or might experience, after I demonstrated that your “German law” pretext was nonsense, and a lie, and which specific Amazon “content guidelines” the book violates, is also much appreciated. Again, it evokes that “You-Are-Dealing-With-A-Faceless-Orwellian-Machine” feeling, so … good job!

Thank you also for the gibberish about “publishing rights” in European countries, which has absolutely nothing to do with this matter.

I will be sure to update you regarding the results of your efforts to damage my income and reputation as an author in due course. Until then …

All best wishes and kindest personal regards,
CJ Hopkins

###

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 staff 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, it’s official. On Wednesday, August 24, New Normal Germany’s Bundestag rubber stamped the government’s latest revision to the so-called “Infection Protection Act” (i.e., New Normal Germany’s new Enabling Act), authorizing the continued persecution of “the Unvaccinated” (i.e., New Normal Germany’s new official Untermenschen), the mandatory wearing of medical-looking masks (i.e., the ideological-compliance symbol of the New Normal Reich throughout the world), the banning of protests against the New Normal (i.e., the new official ideology of Germany), and assorted other “emergency measures.”

These “emergency measures” are purportedly designed to protect the German people from a “health threat” that (a) does not exist; (b) the vast majority of other countries in Europe and the rest of the world have finally admitted does not exist; (c) never existed in the first place; and (d) not even the most fanatical Covidian Cultists can still pretend to present a plausible argument for the existence of without sounding like severely cognitively-impaired persons.

For example, Karl Lauterbach (who is still for some reason the official Minister of Health of Germany, despite the fact that he has been lying to the public and fomenting hatred of “the Unvaccinated” like the reanimated corpse of Joseph Goebbels on a daily basis for over two years) explained why Germany is pushing ahead with its plan to coercively “vaccinate” the entire population, over and over. According to Lauterbach, the “vaccines” cause “multiply-vaccinated” persons to develop symptoms of the illness their multiple “vaccinations” were designed to keep them from being infected with more quickly than “the Unvaccinated,” so they stay home, and thus help to “limit the pandemic,” whereas “the Unvaccinated,” being “asymptomatic,” go around heedlessly infecting “the Vaccinated,” which they wouldn’t be doing if they had been “multiply-vaccinated,” as they would be home suffering the flu-like symptoms they were assured the “vaccines” would protect them from suffering but which actually caused them to suffer more quickly.

OK, at this point, I know you’re probably asking, “why haven’t the German people demanded the removal of this obviously deranged clown from office?” Well, unfortunately, the problem isn’t just Karl Lauterbach. It’s also Olaf Scholz, the Chancellor of Germany, Marco Buschmann, the Minister of Justice, and the rest of the government of New Normal Germany, and the vast majority of the German people, who appear to be willing to behave as if the rest of the world did not exist, and click heels and mindlessly follow orders, no matter how completely absurd.

For example, if you’re flying to New Normal Germany from some other country where reality prevails, the moment your plane enters German airspace, you are required to don a medical-looking mask, and not just any old medical-looking mask, but an FFP2 Filtering Face Piece as defined by the EN 149 standard, which has been proven to protect you from the BA.5 Variant of the Omicron Variant of the SARS CoV-2 Variant (i.e., the original Covid-19 Variant) by the “the Golden Syrian Hamster Model,” according to the New Normal German authorities.**

Of course, this Filtering Face Piece mandate does not apply to government officials and their mouthpieces in the German media, an entire planeload of whom just flew from New Normal Germany to New Normal Canada and back in a state of flagrant masklessness.

And that is just one of the numerous examples of the fascistic spirit that has taken hold of the country I willingly emigrated to almost exactly 18 years ago, which I now no longer recognize. Here’s another one, which will turn your stomach. It’s a video clip of a Deutsche Bahn Gestapo Officer (a newly created official position formerly known as “train conductor”) barking orders at a maskless woman, over and over, like in a Spielberg film, then finally physically assaulting the woman …

I think that will suffice in terms of examples of the atmosphere here in New Normal Germany.

Now, believe it or not, I have tried to give the German people the benefit of the doubt (i.e., as a people) during the last two and a half years. Sure, I have occasionally likened their behavior to the behavior of the German people during their unsavory (i.e., Nazi) past, and I have compared the evolution of New Normal Germany to the early days of Nazi Germany on … OK, more than a few occasions, but I have emphasized that this disturbingly fascistic, mindless, order-following behavior has nothing to do with the German character per se, because we’ve seen the identical disturbingly fascistic, mindless, order-following behavior erupt in countries all over the world, but, at this point, if the German people continue to behave in a disturbingly fascistic, mindless, order-following manner while people all throughout the rest of the world go about their daily lives without having to show their “vaccination papers” to some goon to be allowed to enter a café and get a fucking cup of coffee, and otherwise exist in a more or less maskless, post-mass-hysterically-paranoid state … if the Germans are willing to continue to do that (i.e., behave in the aforementioned mindlessly fascistic, authority-worshiping, frightening fashion and make themselves the laughing stock of the world), I’m not going to be so nice anymore. I’m going to call them some derogatory names. I’m going to question their character as a people. I’m going to publicly speculate about exactly what the fuck is wrong with them.

I hope and pray I don’t have to do that. We’ve got about a month before the new “restrictions” take effect. Which is plenty of time for the German people to rise up and put an end to all this. I’ve been assured by my German friends that the German people will not do this, but what can I say? I’m a hopeless optimist.

In any event, I’ll keep you posted … unless, of course, I get arrested the for “delegitimizing the democractic state” or “relativizing the Holocaust,” or whatever.

In the meantime, enjoy the end of Summer, and don’t worry too much about what’s happening here in New Normal Germany, or in New Normal Canada, or New Normal Washington DC, or wherever. It all over now, mostly, isn’t it, the whole New Normal nightmare, right? They would never, ever, do it again … not wherever you live, right?

CJ Hopkins
August 26, 2022
Photos: Downfall (the film); Twitter

* OK, I assume you’re wondering about the title. Geist means “spirit” (or “mind” or “intellect”), as in “Zeitgeist” (i.e., “the spirit of the age”), which you know because we’ve adopted it into English. Geisterfahrer is one of those essentially untranslatable German words. It basically means someone who’s driving in the wrong direction, i.e., against the flow of traffic, in the opposite direction to which everyone else is driving, but in a figurative rather than a literal sense.** GOLDEN SYRIAN HAMSTER MODEL RESULTS: “Noncontact transmission was found in 66.7% (10/15) of exposed naive hamsters. Surgical mask partition for challenged index or naive hamsters significantly reduced transmission to 25% (6/24, P = .018). Surgical mask partition for challenged index hamsters significantly reduced transmission to only 16.7% (2/12, P = .019) of exposed naive hamsters. Unlike the severe manifestations of challenged hamsters, infected naive hamsters had lower clinical scores, milder histopathological changes, and lower viral nucleocapsid antigen expression in respiratory tract tissues.” (Seriously, this is from the actual study the Ministry of Health of New Normal Germany has cited as proof of the effectiveness of masks.)

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 staff 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.

On 1 September, 1941, Chief of Reich Security Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most fanatical, mass-murdering Nazis, issued a now notorious decree ordering Jews above the age of six to wear an identifying badge in public. The Jewish Badge, a yellow Star of David with the word “Jew” inscribed inside the star, was meant to stigmatize and humiliate the Jews and was also used to segregate them and monitor and control their movements.

Nothing like that is happening currently, especially not in New Normal Germany.

What is happening currently in New Normal Germany is the fascist fanatics in control of the government are rewriting the “Infection Protection Act,” again — as they have been doing repeatedly for the last two years — in order to allow themselves to continue to violate the German constitution (the “Grundgesetz“) and rule the nation by arbitrary decree under the guise of “protecting the public health.”

This repeatedly revised “Infection Protection Act” — which has granted the government of New Normal Germany the authority to order lockdowns, curfews, the outlawing of protests against the New Normal, the mandatory wearing of medical-looking masks, the segregation and persecution of “the Unvaccinated,” etc. — is of course in no way remotely comparable to the “Enabling Act of 1933,” which granted the government of Nazi Germany the authority to issue whatever decrees it wanted under the guise of “remedying the distress of the people.”

There is absolutely no similarity whatsoever between these two pieces of legislation.

I mean, look at this “Autumn/Winter Plan” for the new revision of the “Infection Protection Act,” which will remain in effect from October until Easter, and which government officials and state propagandists (a/k/a the German media) are likening to “snow chain ordinances.”

There is absolutely nothing creepily fascistic or remotely Nazi about this plan.

Sorry, it’s in German. Allow me to translate.

On planes and trains and at the airports and train stations, everyone will be forced to wear doggy-snout masks — i.e., FFP2 “Filtering Face Pieces” as defined by the EN 149 standard — except for the staff of the airports and train stations, and the flight attendants, conductors, etc., who will only be forced to wear “medical-looking masks.” In hospitals, clinics, doctors’ offices, nursing homes and other healthcare facilities, everyone, including the staff, will not only be forced to wear the dog-snout masks but they will also be forced to submit to testing, unless they can provide proof of “vaccination” (or recovery, which also means being tested) within the previous three-month period. On the premises of private companies, i.e., offices, factories, warehouses, and so on, the previously rescinded Arbeitsschutzverordnung (“Corona Occupational Safety Ordinance”) — masks, tests, forced “vaccinations,” “social distancing,” plastic barriers, etc. — will go back into effect in October and will remain in effect until the Easter holidays.

The individual federal states will be empowered to impose other senseless “restrictions,” like general mask mandates in shops, restaurants, and every other type of “interior spaces,” limits on the number of people who can gather publicly or in their homes, and mandatory masks for kids in schools and testing in kindergartens and daycare facilities. In restaurants, bars, theaters, museums, sports facilities, and pretty much everywhere else in society, the federal states can demand that people show proof of recent “vaccination” or recovery to be exempted from having to wear a mask.

OK, allow me to translate again.

What that last part means is that anyone who refuses to submit to repeated “vaccination” or testing will be forced to wear a mask in public to identify themselves as “Unvaccinated” (i.e., the New Normal Reich’s official “Untermenschen”).

So, OK, maybe it’s a little creepily fascistic and not as non-Nazi as I suggested above. I put it this way in a recent tweet …

Needless to say, this could get confusing, as the New Normals are extremely attached to their masks, which they’ve been wearing — like Nazis wore swastika lapel pins — to publicly signal their “solidarity” (i.e., mindless conformity to the new official ideology) for going on the last two and half years. And now the masks will function like the “Jewish Badges” with the Star of David that the Nazis forced the Jews to wear, except on public transportation, and planes and trains, unless the federal states decide to force everyone to wear masks everywhere, in which case … well, you get the general idea.

Still, the fact that everyone will have to present their “vaccination papers” (or their “recovery papers”) to enter a restaurant, or a bar, or go to the cinema or the theater, and, basically, to do anything else in society, should make up for the mask confusion. I mean, what kind of a fascist society would it be if you didn’t have to show your “papers” to some beady-eyed goon to get a cup of coffee?

Now, before you report me to the BfV, i.e., Germany’s federal domestic intelligence agency, for “relativizing the Holocaust” and “delegitimizing the democratic state,” both of which are crimes here in Germany, I want to say, again, for the record, that I do not advocate using the yellow Star of David to protest the New Normal (as in the photo in the tweet above). I think it is foolish, and counterproductive. The New Normal has nothing to do with the Holocaust, or the Jews, or even Nazism per se.

But let’s be clear about what’s happening in Germany.

What is happening is, a new official ideology is being imposed on society. It is being imposed on society by force. And now, those of us who refuse to conform to it will be ordered to walk around in public wearing visible symbols of our non-conformity.

I’m sorry, but the parallels are undeniable.

This new official ideology has nothing to do with a respiratory virus or any other public health threat. At this point, I do not have to repeat this argument. The majority of countries around the world have finally rescinded their “emergency measures” and acknowledged the facts that we “conspiracy theorists” have been citing for the past two and a half years, and that we have been relentlessly demonized and censored for citing.

Not even Germany’s recent independent evaluation of its “Corona Measures” could produce any evidence supporting their effectiveness. Seriously, the New Normal German authorities are basing their claim for the efficacy of mask mandates on “the Golden Syrian Hamster Model.” (You probably think I’m joking, but I’m not.) And Karl Lauterbach, the fanatical Minister of Health, has openly stated that forcing “the Unvaccinated” to wear masks in public is a “motivation” tactic to harass them into following orders and submitting to a “vaccination” that even the German government now admits has killed or seriously injured tens of thousands of people, at minimum, in Germany.

No, this new official ideology, the New Normal — which is still very much in effect in places like Germany, China, Canada, Australia, New York, California, etc. — is nakedly, undeniably, purely ideological. It is based, not on facts, but belief. It is a belief system, as is every other ideology. It is essentially no different than an official religion … one which demonizes and persecutes all other religions, and non-religions, and all other belief systems.

According to this new official belief system, those of us who maintain different beliefs, and refuse to convert to the new official beliefs (or pretend to convert to the new official beliefs), are dangerous, foreign elements in society. And thus, from now on, in New Normal Germany, we will be forced to wear a visible symbol of our different beliefs (our “otherness”) in public, so that the authorities and the Good German masses will be able to identify us.

Is any of this sounding vaguely familiar?

I’m fairly certain that someone will read this (and see the tweets I included above) and report me for “relativizing the Holocaust.” For the record, I am not “relativizing the Holocaust.” I’m comparing one totalitarian system to another. Yes, Nazi Germany and New Normal Germany are two very different totalitarian systems, and I have outlined their essential differences and similarities, but, come on, this is not that fucking hard. In Nazi Germany, the Jews were the scapegoats. In New Normal Germany, it’s “the Unvaccinated.”

How much more blatant does it have to get before people stop pretending that this isn’t what it is? Do the authorities have to literally put us in camps? How many more people have to die or be seriously injured by “vaccinations” they did not need but were forced to submit to? I’m not talking to the New Normals now, nor to the people who have been fighting this all along. I’m talking to the people who see what is happening, and are horrified by what is happening, but, for whatever reasons, have refused to speak out … and, yes, I know there are very good reasons. Some of you have families to support, and careers to protect, and, seriously, I get it. But how far does it have to go? At what point do you feel you have to speak out regardless of the personal and professional consequences?

Maybe take some time and meditate on that.

Oh, and here’s a little visual aid that might help folks with their meditations. It’s some graffiti that someone painted on the wall of a courtyard here in New Normal Germany, in the Autumn of 2021, I think. I posted it back then, but it didn’t make much of an impression. Perhaps it will make one now.

I’ll translate. It reads “GAS THE UNVACCINATED.”

###

CJ Hopkins
August 6, 2022
Photos: Archiwum Panstwowe w Krakowie; The Federal Republic of New Normal Germany; 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 staff 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 know, you’re probably sick and tired of hearing about the Rise of the New Normal Reich. You want it to be over. So do I. It isn’t over … not by a long shot. It might seem like it’s over where you are. I imagine it does if you live in Florida, or in Texas, or the UK, or Sweden, or Croatia, or in some other country or state in which the majority of the “Covid restrictions” have been lifted, or perhaps were never introduced in the first place. If that’s the case, I’m happy for you.

I happen to live in New Normal Germany, the current tip of the New Normal spear, or one of the tips of one of its spears (or mRNA-laced hypodermic needles), the others being countries and states like Canada, China, Australia, New York, California, and assorted other hotbeds of New Normalism. If you live in one of these New Normal strongholds, as I do, you are acutely aware of how it is not over.

Yes, the Covidian Cult is kaput. The spell has been broken. Only the most insanely fanatical New Normal cultists continue to walk around in public in their plague masks and homemade hazmat suits. But the New Normal Reich is not kaput. The New Normal Reich is being … well, normalized. The masses are being systematically conditioned to accept the biosecurity police state that the global-capitalist ruling classes have been implementing for the last three years. Despite the now irrefutable evidence that the “vaccines” do not prevent transmission of the virus, “the Unvaccinated” are still being segregated, banned from working, attending school, competing in major sporting events, and so on. People are still being forced to wear masks — the symbol of the New Normal Reich — on planes, trains, public transport, in doctors offices, hospitals, et cetera. Here, there, and everywhere, New Normal symbols and social rituals are being permanently integrated into everyday life.

These symbols and rituals are more than just the window dressing of the New Normal Reich. They are how our new “reality” is being created and maintained. The masses are like actors being forced to emotionally invest in the “reality” of an absurdist stage play. The more they repeat the performance, the more convincing the fictional “reality” becomes, regardless of how patently absurd it is … and it is becoming more and more absurd.

For example, at the airports in New Normal Canada, citizens attempting to enter their own country without the so-called “ArriveCAN” app on their smartphones to provide proof of their “vaccination status” (including octogenarians who do not own smartphones) are subjected to extended absurdist harassment by imbecilic New Normal clowns in red vests. Here in New Normal Germany, the government is preparing to force everyone to wear medical-looking masks in public every Autumn and Winter, not just on account of the “Apocalyptic Plague” but also on account of the normal Winter flu. The pretext doesn’t really matter anymore. The point is the display of ideological uniformity.

Meanwhile, Germany’s Federal Ministry of Health was forced to publish a limited hangout regarding “vaccination” injuries and deaths. They did it classic Goebbelsian fashion.

Apparently, they didn’t like the actual data on the number of serious adverse effects, so they decided to just lie about them on Twitter. (Serious adverse effects were reported in roughly 1 in 5,000 doses, not 1 in 5,000 “vaccinated” people. Approximately 184,000,000 doses have been administered to people in Germany and … well, you can do the math.) Naturally, the Twitter Corporation has been slapping its fake “misleading” warning on retweets pointing out the Ministry of Health’s lie, because the truth is whatever the Corporatocracy says it is, and everything else is “disinformation.”

If you think I’m being harsh or hyperbolic in characterizing the Ministry’s lie as a lie, keep in mind that the German Minister of Health, Karl Lauterbach, has been lying, repeatedly, to the German public for over two years now. Here he is lying about the “side-effects-free vaccines” in August 2021, right around the time he ordered the segregation of “the Unvaccinated” and fomented hatred of anyone who refused to conform to New Normal ideology …

And now, tens of thousands of people in Germany — at minimum, as vaccine adverse-effects have always been significantly under-reported — have been seriously injured or … you know, killed, because Karl and his fascistic New Normal cronies lied to everyone, over and over, and the German media repeated those lies, and the New Normal masses repeated those lies, and the government and global corporations censored, deplatformed, and demonized those of us who challenged those lies as “far-right extremists,” “science deniers,” “anti-vaxxers,” and so on.

And these are just a few recent examples. I don’t think I need to provide an exhaustive list. At this point, you are either well aware and capable of facing what’s happening, or you’re not, in which case you are telling yourself whatever you need to tell yourself in order to pretend that what is happening isn’t happening.

If that is what you’re doing, I cannot help you. Nothing I write or say will get through to you. Facts will not make any difference to you. Government and health officials and media talking heads will lie to your face, over and over, and get caught lying, and you will go on adamantly repeating their lies, not because you do not understand that they are lies, but because you do not care that they are lies. You do not care that you are killing and injuring countless people with your officially-approved lies, with your cowardice, with your mindless obedience. Your goal is to remain within the bounds of “normality,” and not get called a lot of names and get ostracized from your social circle, and if a lot of people have to die and you have to abandon any semblance of integrity and intellectual honesty to achieve that, so be it.

As for the rest of us, those who are aware of what’s happening and are doing our best to face what’s happening, even if we don’t understand what’s happening, or disagree about why it’s happening, I wish I had something clever to offer in terms of how to make it stop happening.

I don’t, other than what I’ve been advocating, i.e., organized, non-violent civil disobedience, like what the Canadian truckers did in Ottawa, like what the Dutch farmers are doing in The Netherlands. Columns like this, social media memes, sporadic Sunday mass demonstrations, and individual acts of non-compliance are not going to stop the New Normal juggernaut. The normalization of the New Normal will continue, the pathologization of society will continue, the destabilization and restructuring of the global economy will continue, unless something truly historic happens and the workers of the world unite (or if the sovereign individuals of the world unite if “workers” sounds too Commie to you) and jam a monkey wrench into the New Normal machinery.

The chances of that happening are slim. In my 60 years of corporeal existence, I have never experienced a time when people were this alienated, hopeless, and at each other’s throats. I can’t recall a time when people were this humorless, sanctimonious, and vicious … and I am talking about the people who could make a difference, not the order-following New Normal masses. If there was ever a time when the working classes needed to set aside their political differences and flex their collective muscles, this is it, but most of us are too busy pissing on each other to score cheap points on Twitter, or Gettr, or Telegram, or, you know, wherever.

I’m sorry to end on such a pessimistic note … I’m recovering from the Apocalyptic Plague, so perhaps I’m just feeling overly gloomy. Probably everything will be just fine, and people will eventually come to their senses, and the global-capitalist ruling classes will cancel the whole New Normal thing, and no one needs to organize any kind of international non-violent civil-disobedience campaign, and, one day, we’ll wake up and check our phones and discover that there was no New Normal Reich, and that no one ever died because of a vaccine, and we will check our social credit status, and tell our smart-kitchens to start cooking our crickets, and pull up the War-of-the-Day on our ViewScreens so we can root for whoever we were told to root for … and everything will finally be “normal” again.

###

CJ Hopkins
July 22, 2022
Photos: NTV, 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 staff up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian sci-fi novel, Zone 23, or Volumes I, II, and III of his Consent Factory Essays, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, feel free to contact him directly.

So, the government of New Normal Germany is contemplating forcing everyone to wear medical-looking masks in public from October to Easter on a permanent basis. Seriously, the fanatical New Normal fascists currently in charge of Germany’s government — mostly the SPD and the Greens — are discussing revising the “Infection Protection Act” in order to grant themselves the authority to continue to rule the country by decree, as they have been doing since the Autumn of 2020, thus instituting a “permanent state of emergency” that overrides the German constitution, indefinitely.

Go ahead, read that paragraph again. Take a break from the carnage in non-Nazi Ukraine, the show trials in the US congress, monkeypoxmania, Sudden Adult Death Syndrome, Sudden Bovine Death Syndrome, family-oriented drag queens, non-“vaccine”-related facial paralysis, and Biden falling off his bike, and reflect on what this possibly portends, the dominant country of the European Union dispensing with any semblance of democracy and transforming into a fascist biosecurity police state.

OK, let me try to be more precise, as I don’t want to be arrested for “spreading disinformation” or “delegitimizing the state.” Germany is not dispensing with the semblance of democracy. No, the German constitution will remain in effect. It’s just that the revised Infection Protection Act — like the “Enabling Act of 1933,” which granted the Nazi government the authority to issue any edicts it wanted under the guise of “remedying the distress of the people” — will grant the New Normal German government the authority to continue to supersede the constitution and issue whatever edicts it wants under the guise of “protecting the public health” … for example, forcing the German masses to display their conformity to the new official ideology by wearing medical-looking masks on their faces for six or seven months of every year.

In addition to a ritualized mass-demonstration of mindlessly fascist ideological conformity (a standard feature of all totalitarian systems), this annual October-to-Easter mask-mandate, by simulating the new paranoid “reality” in which humanity is under constant attack by deadly viruses and other “public health threats,” will cement the New Normal ideology into place. If not opposed and stopped here in Germany, it will spread to other European countries, and to Canada, and Australia, and the New Normal US states. If you think what happens in Germany doesn’t matter because you live in Florida, or in Sweden, or the UK, you haven’t been paying attention recently. The roll-out of the New Normal is a global project … a multi-phase, multi-faceted project. Germany is just the current “tip of the spear.”

Sadly, the majority of the German masses will mindlessly click heels and follow orders, as they have since the Spring of 2020. They’re all enjoying a “summer break” at the moment, but come October they will don their masks, start segregating and persecuting “the Unvaccinated,” and otherwise behaving like fascists again. I hesitate to blame it on the German character, because we’ve witnessed the same mindlessly fascistic behavior all around the world over the past two years, but, I have to admit, there is something particularly scary about how the Germans do it.

Meanwhile, Germany’s FBI (der Bundesverfassungsschutz, or BfV) is hard at work enforcing the new Gleichschaltung. According to a report in Die Welt, the BfV is not just surveilling people who use terms like “Corona dictatorship” (and presumably a long list of other “wrongspeak” words), but it is also “surveilling people and groups that disseminate conspiracy theories, or call the democratic nature of the state into question.” Politicians are insisting that the BfV “toughen up the classification of political crime, especially regarding the Corona deniers.”

Yes, that’s right, publicly challenging the official Covid-19 narrative, or protesting official New Normal ideology, is a political crime here in New Normal Germany. It has been since May 2021, when the Bundesverfassungsschutz established a new official category of domestic extremism … “Anti-democratic or Security-threatening Delegitimization of the State.” I covered this in one of my columns at the time (“The Criminalization of Dissent” ) as did some corporate press, like The New York Times (“German Intelligence Puts Coronavirus Deniers Under Surveillance”), but, for some reason, the story didn’t get much traction.

“Delegitimization of the State” … let that language sink in for a moment. What it means is that anyone the New Normal authorities deem to be “delegitimizing the state” can be arrested and charged as a “political criminal.” I wasn’t entirely clear on what is meant by “delegitimizing,” so I looked the word up, and the definition I found was “to diminish or destroy the legitimacy, prestige, or authority” of something, or someone, which … I don’t know, sounds a little overly broad and subject to arbitrary interpretation.

For example, if I, right here in this column, were to propose that the German government had no legitimate reasons whatsoever for locking down the entire population, forcing everyone to wear medical-looking masks, and demonizing and segregating “the Unvaccinated,” that might make me a “political criminal.” Likewise, if I were to describe Karl Lauterbach, the Minister of Health of New Normal Germany, as a fanatical fascist, and a sociopathic liar, that might make me a “political criminal.” Or, if I were to point out how the German state media have deceived and gaslighted the German public for over two years like the proverbial Goebbelsian keyboard instrument, that might make me a “political criminal.” Or, if I were crazy enough to publish a book of essays written over the past two years documenting The Rise of the New Normal Reich, including essays about New Normal Germany, that might also make me a “political criminal.”

Naturally, I am a little uneasy, living in a former-Nazi country where I could be classified as a “political criminal” for my activities as an author and a political satirist … which, of course, is the point of the new classification. It is meant to scare dissidents like me into silence. Or … OK, it isn’t meant for me. It is meant for German dissidents like me. I’m an American, not a German citizen. So the chances of a heavily-armed “Special Commando” team storming my apartment in the wee hours of the morning and arresting me on trumped-up weapons charges — as they recently did to Dr. Paul Brandenburg, an outspoken opponent of the New Normal Reich — are probably (hopefully) fairly remote.

In any event, I would never do that, i.e., attempt to diminish the prestige or authority of the Federal Republic of New Normal Germany, or in any way compare it to Nazi Germany, or any other totalitarian system, or describe it as a nascent biosecurity police state wherein the rule of law has been supplanted by the arbitrary edicts of fascist fanatics, because that would just be asking for trouble. After all, if we’ve learned anything from history, the smart thing to do during times like these is to keep one’s mouth shut and follow orders, and if you hear a train coming … well, just look the other way.

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CJ Hopkins
June 20, 2022
Photos: Tagesschau, 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 staff 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.