Commentary, Punditry, and More
This weekend, it was The Other McCain. This morning, it was Instapundit courtesy of Vodka Pundit himself Stephen Green. My thanks to you!
The Other McCain linked to The Great Silencing Proceeds (the entire series can be found here), and Instapundit linked to Protests, Armed Or Otherwise (more in Politics can be found here).
For those who might be interested in browsing around, please do check out the Preparedness category as well as other work.
When I wrote this post, I had hoped that it would take much longer to get to this point. I’m not at all surprised at what is happening, just how fast — and how open — it is going. See my posts on Phase II and Mask Dropping for additional thoughts.
They don’t just want to silence any and all opposition, they want to destroy any and all opposition. To be honest, to hold power, they will have to do so, and literal killing has been going on for months now. The media has relentlessly suppressed the political assassinations of, and attacks on, Trump supporters, focusing instead on the few real instances of any pushback at their brownshirts. Sadly, I believe that killing by the progressives and their brownshirts will soon go wholesale. Be prepared.
The efforts to demonitize opposition is also rapidly escalating. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has entered the fray, along with other major companies. Look at what happened to Parler, and how even family and those not directly associated with attempts to create bastions of free speech have had all means of funding/banking suspended (see Gab’s founder as but one example).
Mainstream media continues to fall deeper into the sewer, with more mainstream reporters turning against independent journalists. In the media, it has been widely ignored for some time that “journalists” in Portland and elsewhere have engaged in active efforts to put Andy Ngo’s life in danger.
The destruction of lives continues, with the call to ban anyone who worked for or supported Trump already bearing fruit. Here is but one example of people being driven to suicide. Yes, there are more, go dig.
They hate you, they really, really hate you and literally do want you dead. When they talk of camps, re-education, ending careers and threating to destroy any who employ anyone who worked for or supported Trump, or killing anyone who worked for or supported Trump, they are being quite literal, not figurative. They mean it. Believe them. Now, they are going to move even more into the open. Also, keep in mind that hate is all they have. They have no love, no forgiveness, no Grace; and, while that will eventually will turn them on themselves, they will have no compunction about and will celebrate every destruction and death.
The next major operation will be creating another incident to use to push not just gun control, but gun confiscation. They’ve started by turning the demonstration at the Capitol into such a moment, but need more. All the more reason I urge anyone and everyone to boycott the inauguration and especially the false-flag armed protests being talked about. They hate to be ignored and they hate to be ridiculed. A boycott hits both, so use it. Do not fall for false flag events, don’t do something stupid and give them what they need. Make them fabricate it, so that more and more see what lies beneath the masks that have been removed.
Meantime, fight back. Get active in forums that Big Tech has not yet brought down. Read, listen, think, and share. Then, start local. There is a reason George Soros has been funding people in local elections. A good start is to find out who took such funding, and primary them and support a decent replacement. Support not establishment candidates, but good people who will do the job and follow the Constitution. Cleaning out the establishment politicians and the progressives locally isolates those in DC and chips away at their power.
Go read the posts from Sarah A. Hoyt, especially her posts Dance To The Line and Line Dancing: How To Be A Scary Moron. There are others I will mention later, but Sarah has already surved socialism once and has insights many do not.
WELCOME READERS FROM THE OTHER McCAIN!
This weekend, it was The Other McCain. This morning, it was Instapundit courtesy of Vodka Pundit himself Stephen Green. My thanks to you!
The Other McCain linked to The Great Silencing Proceeds (the entire series can be found here), and Instapundit linked to Protests, Armed Or Otherwise (more in Politics can be found here).
For those who might be interested in browsing around, please do check out the Preparedness category as well as other work.
UPDATE II:
For anyone whining that this is not pro-active enough, or that are truly looking at viable ways to resist/fight back, check out What Else Can I Do.
Big Tech, and the Media, have dropped the mask and elements of The Great Silencing are on display for all to see. To be honest, I think that Twitter and Facebook are surprised at the pushback, that in their arrogance and cultivating of the bureaucracy they truly thought they could get away with it.
I’ve written about The Great Silencing here (Part I) and here (Part II). There is far more going on, and at more platforms (hello Google!) than people realize. There are efforts to silence or destroy individuals, sites and technology, as well as parties and campaigns. You even have the Washington Post running damage control trying to deny (or diminish) that Biden threatened to withhold aid unless the prosecutor investigating Burisma was fired. Only problem with that, Biden is on video bragging about doing so.
As blatant as the censorship of the Biden story was, there is more to come. The media, and I include Social Media big tech in that, is all in on trying to prevent information from getting out even as they seek to suppress voter enthusiasm and turnout. Much of the coverage of the polls is pure psyop at this point. One can argue that almost all mainstream media coverage at this point is psyop against the American people.
If the psyops don’t appear to be working, or don’t work at all, hang on to your hats for what is to come. Personally, I’m treating the next few weeks, and the month of November, in much the same way I would treat an oncoming natural disaster: prepare for the worst, and hope for the best. That said, prepare for the Great Silencing to get even more physical that it has so far, as the political assassinations of Trump supporters is just getting started. Violence against Citizens for simply wearing or displaying support for Trump has been normalized, and ignored (encouraged even). If that’s what it takes to win, well, they are all in.
I will note that one of the more interesting, and potentially a very good thing for the Republic, is that Donald Trump isn’t so much ripping the masks off people and institutions, but that they are ripping them off themselves to go after him. When the masks slip, or are thrown down, believe what you see beneath.
Be prepared, be as safe as you can, and be informed. Dig into the news, go to real journalists and sources, and don’t blindly take what Mainstream Media and Social Media say as gospel. When you vote, record your vote if you can. Vote informed.
Good Luck.
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it, and not just in summer school. There is a history behind what is happening right now, and that also applies to the mobs. This essay is well worth reading, and deserves the widest possible audience, as it goes into the sordid and bloody history of Millenarian Mobs. Hat tip to Powerline.
Three quotes stand out from the essay.
Given the Great Silencing (part II HERE) underway with the expansive censoring by Big Tech as one wing, this quote stood out:
Cohn shows how the adherence of lower-class masses, the phenomenon of crowds shut off from alternative sources of information and argument, helped drive these movements along their radical logic, to the point that their adepts became utterly closed to reality. We might say of them that they mixed and drank the Kool-Aid that killed them.
This quote also stood out as it is something I’ve said for a while:
Our own generation’s ruling classes are seized by no demons. Instead, they are principally concerned with holding on to power, and short-sightedly regard the revolutionary movements as allies against their socio-political competitors. That is why today it makes sense to consider the violent masses, and to some extent even the purified elite, as in effect pawns of the ruling classes.
And, finally:
Alas, the millennialists and their mob do not need specific grievances against specific targets. The civilization itself is the only real target; its existence and the mob’s lack of complete mastery over it are the only grievances that really matter. They need know only that the civilization they are attacking has become vulnerable, undefended, and may be safely treated with contempt. If we do not share that contempt, history shows we have no choice but to treat the millennialist mob as the enemies they are.
Please, go read the whole thing. Oh, and if you are Antifa or BLM, you might want to look into the Brownshirts and what happened to them; and, if media, you might want to look at who was among the first to the wall in almost every Marxist takeover in the world in the last century. They are happy to use you, but they don’t like you. You would do well to read Sarah A. Hoyt’s message to you.
Finally, this really should be added to my Gust Front post as it is another sign the storm is upon us. Lone crackpot or someone field testing training (or conducting training)? The scary thing is that the latter has to even be considered.
Want to put an end to Cancel Culture and throw a huge spanner into The Great Silencing (Phase I and Phase II)? It’s actually fairly easy to do, though it takes guts and more for the first part.
First, quit apologizing because someone, somewhere, got offended by something you said, did, or liked. Tell the mob to go feck themselves, even if it means some tough times for you and yours. Apologizing does not work, according to a study, as noted before in my first post on The Great Silencing. Let others grovel, stay strong.
Second, I think that going back into every social media post on every possible platform of those who are making these virtue signal posts, from the teacher in Alabama who got a church booted because the pastor liked some posts from Charlie Cook to the person who got a driver fired for the racist act of cracking his knuckles, and posting their “sins” in the high church of hysteria is a good idea. Some of that is already happening, as Rick Wilson and his wife learned belatedly (and deservedly). Until it becomes painful, extremely painful, and the poster faces the same results of job loss and being hounded by their own, it will not end.
The second is easy to do, just takes time and people willing to dig. The first is hard, as I said. But, it’s time we start. One kneels before God, not the mob. Remember that.
Earlier, I wrote about the Great Silencing that has begun. Now, as noted then, there have always been efforts but this is something new. This is a coordinated and deliberate effort to target anything other than progressive thought (and even wrongthought) and destroy the people behind it as well as to either deplatform or delegitimize those outlets.
Now, Phase II has begun with an effort to demonetize those platforms. Just as Professor Jacobson and Legal Insurrection were the first major effort for Phase I, Phase II is off (to a rocky start thank goodness) with an effort by NBC no less.
The basic story is here, at Legal Insurrection, but it is most telling that NBC fired the first shot by working with a foreign organization to target two competitors on the conservative/libertarian side. As I noted earlier, none of the three entities involved have covered themselves in glory. In fact, I hope an investigation is undertaken, as I feel it is more than warranted under Section 230, RICO, and anti-trust acts. What NBC has done is against every concept of a free and open press, but make no mistake: the progressive left does not want a free an open press anymore than they want free speech. They want an end to both, and to any expression of thought outside the orthodoxy of the moment.
Right now, as much as I support Professor Jacobson, I have no faith that Cornell will back him. In fact, I expect them to cave to the mob, sooner rather than later though I would be delighted to be wrong. Meantime, that they have held this long is throwing a spanner into the works for the next targets, which I believe have already been chosen. The unexpected pushback against NBC and what it did have likewise tossed another spanner into the works.
No matter what the outcome of these two cases, however, expect to see a lot more of this happen as all stops will be pulled out to push the chosen narrative. This will happen more, and more viciously, the closer we get to the election.
Nor is the Great Silencing the only campaign planned. Keep your eyes open and be prepared, for the progressives are going all in on the election.
Several things have kicked off sooner than I expected, using the George Floyd case as a pretext. One is what I call “The Great Silencing” which is an effort to block political dialog and information that is contrary to the goals of the progressive block. I was expecting to see it truly start up around late July/early August, but never let a crisis go to waste…
It’s not just about silencing on social media. It is about shutting down blogs and other alternatives to major social media. It is about discrediting information and sources, or providing a pretext of such so that the mainstream media can use that pretext to deny coverage or to discredit information from individuals and independent sites to shape the narrative.
I see the effort to get Professor William A. Jacobson fired from Cornell as the opening offensive of this operation. As others have noted, he has done important work on a variety of high-profile and important events. His Legal Insurrection Foundation is a novel and needed approach to investigative journalism. I note that I check Legal Insurrection blog daily for the well researched and documented stories they post.
For now, Eduardo M. Peñalver, dean of the law school, is saying his job is safe, though he provided what the progressive’s need both by what the Volokh Conspiracy notes is “an entirely gratuitous, and somewhat unfair condemnation” as well as what could be considered a deliberate mischaracterization of what Professor Jacobson wrote. Even if he does end up keeping his job (something I have doubts about), the media can point to the statement by Peñalver to discredit Jacobson and any/all work from Legal Insurrection.
This is not what some call battlefield-preparation, that’s been going on for years. This is the opening shot in the next major campaign to silence free speech and to censor opinions before the election. You can expect to see a LOT more of this, as the cancel culture is turned on any and all major voices not promoting the party line, especially those opposed to the party line. Any individual or group blog that is in opposition that has anyone who can be gone after will find themselves targeted. Even if they can’t collect a job or otherwise destroy a life, cover will be given so that they can be dismissed in the mainstream media.
Keep in mind that these are people who are going back over years of posts to destroy people for ever having a wrongthought or expressing a wrongposition on any issue. There is no forgiveness, no Grace: a sin is forever (unless you cave to the mob and even then you really aren’t forgiven). They are not doing this just to the prominent, like Professor Jacobson. They are doing it to average people, like this student in Florida.
My advice to all: grow a spine, a pair of reproductive organs of your choice, and stand up to the mob. Embrace the power of “No!” when it comes to demands to kneel, beg forgiveness, and otherwise kowtow to the mob. If you do it there WILL be a temper tantrum as they are spoiled children who have been coddled too long. Let them scream, cry, roll on the ground, and hold their breath until they turn blue. Even if those around you cave (like I expect Cornell and others to cave), even if those you thought friends turn on you (as happened to Professor Jacobson), stand tall, stand firm, and hold on. It is not easy, but also keep in mind that apologizing tends to inflame the mob.
As for what’s next for Professor Jacobson and other targets: Expect to see the firing push extended to getting both him and Legal Insurrection (and all authors there) banned from Twitter and Facebook. While there are alternative outlets (and they are growing), they do not have the marketing push that Facebook and Twitter have. Again, this will happen to all targets. The firing push itself will be expanded and promoted via the media until either Cornell stands firm (unlikely IMO) or caves. Then, they will turn to any and every other facet of his life they can attack, and do so. Cancel Culture is about totally destroying a person and their life.
To that, I can only say: #CancelCancelCulture