Gleichschaltung: The Legal Coordination Of Public Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll keep you posted on the investigation, and I’ll try my best to not go full “L

Guns Make It SOOO HARD To Control American Narrative Hegemony

consentfactory  |  GloboCap, Inc. and its innumerable subsidiaries, agents, assigns, political puppets, media goons, and other loyal minions are desperately endeavoring to enshrine the official Covid-19 narrative in the annals of “history.” According to new figures from the WHO, “almost 15 million excess deaths” (or “a total of 336.8 million lost life-years”) had been caused by the virus by the end of 2021, none of which had anything to do with ventilators, or the classification of anyone who died of anything (i.e., cancer, heart disease, an auto accident, etc.) who had also tested positive as a “Covid death.”

When the globalist establishment realize they do not control the narrative anymore........ pic.twitter.com/o30WQpRmyt

— Richard (@ricwe123) May 22, 2023

Previously perfectly healthy young people are dropping dead left and right from heart attacks and other “natural” (or “undisclosed”) causes that have nothing to do with the experimental “vaccines” that they did not need but were coerced into taking, which saved millions or 100 million lives. The masks that didn’t work worked, except that they didn’t, but that was only if you studied how they worked in reality. Being locked down, forced to wear medical-looking masks, gaslighted and terrorized by official propaganda, bullied, segregated, censored, demonized, and otherwise systematically tortured, was actually good for people’s mental health, except for “people with existing mental health conditions, and children, and people with disabilities, and adolescents, and people without financial or social security nets.”

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

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

Historically, we humans have not done very well in such psychotic ontological environments. When “reality” is shattered into a thousand little shards, and things fall apart, and the center does not hold, we tend to get rather scared, and confused, and agitated. We start to panic. We try to put “reality” back together again. This does not work. This worsens our panic. We start looking around for a new “reality

Think'em Bilderbergers Wuz Talm'bout Flushing These Epstein-Tainted Turds?

WaPo  | As government attorneys unravel Jeffrey Epstein’s complex finances and sex trafficking ring, officials are training their focus on other high-wealth individuals with whom the disgraced financier may have done business.

Epstein’s List: Bill Gates & Mila Antonova, a quick look back 2009–2023 pic.twitter.com/gpgSWAOh5S

— TexasLindsay™ (@TexasLindsay_) May 22, 2023

One of the most closely watched cases comes from the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein maintained a residence, as it pursues a lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase, Epstein’s bank of 15 years. The suit alleges that the institution profited from keeping Epstein on as a client and was complicit in funding his long history of abuse and child sex trafficking.

Deutsche Bank, where Epstein took much of his wealth after leaving JPMorgan in 2013, has already settled a similar case for $75 million. But legal observers say the claims against JPMorgan are far more sweeping than those against Deutsche Bank, covering a period when his trafficking operation was more robust and sophisticated.

Here are the figures surrounding the JPMorgan-Epstein case, and what you need to know about them.

The Pentagram Is Very Happy To See Tucker Carlson Go....,

politico  |  From maternity flight suits to diversity policies to Ukraine aid, the military was a favorite punching bag for Tucker Carlson. Now that he’s off the air, some Pentagon officials are quietly cheering his departure.

U.S intelligence says Russia used Tucker Carlson for their propaganda campaign against Ukraine.

This clip was cited. #TuckerCarlsonFired pic.twitter.com/w3F2IftQuP

— Abraham Stein (@AbrahamStein8) April 25, 2023

Carlson’s criticism of Biden-era personnel policies appealed to many of the rank-and-file, which has a large bloc of conservative members. But at the upper levels of the Defense Department, news of Carlson’s firing from Fox News on Monday was met with delight and outright glee in some corners.

“We’re a better country without him bagging on our military every night in front of hundreds of thousands of people,” said one senior DoD official, who like others interviewed for this story was granted anonymity to discuss a politically sensitive topic.

“Good riddance,” said a second DoD official.

Asked to respond to the news that DoD officials are pleased by his departure from Fox, Carlson responded by text message: “Ha! I’m sure.” He declined to comment further.

The tension between the former cable host and Pentagon leadership isn’t new. Carlson drew the ire of top DoD officials early in the Biden administration for personal attacks on a number of military leaders, as well as ridiculing the armed forces’ efforts to increase diversity. A slew of conservative leaders quickly followed Carlson’s lead, giving rise to a small but vocal minority that to this day continues to hammer DoD officials, saying they’re focusing personnel policies at the expense of preparing for war. The Pentagon says only a small percentage of troops’ time is spent on diversity training.

Most memorably, Carlson’s remarks disparaging female service members in March 2021 prompted a rare rebuke from then-Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby.

After President Joe Biden announced new efforts to recruit and keep women in the service — including designing new body armor, updating requirements for hairstyles and the nominations of two female generals to become combatant commanders — at a White House ceremony, Carlson accused the commander in chief of making a “mockery” of the troops.

“So, we’ve got new hairstyles and maternity flight suits. Pregnant women are going to fight our wars. It’s a mockery of the U.S. military,” he said.

 

MSDNC Proclaims Tucker Fired For Being A MisogynBro

rollingstone  | Former Tucker Carlson producer Abby Grossberg had a lot to say about her ex-boss, detailing her experience with the noxious behind-the-scenes culture of Tucker Carlson Tonight in an interview with MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace on Tuesday. 

Grossberg filed two explosive lawsuits against Fox News in March. She alleges that the network coerced her into changing her deposition to lawyers for Dominion Voting Systems and that she was the victim of a pervasive culture of misogyny and workplace discrimination while working as a producer for host Maria Bartiromo, and now-former host Tucker Carlson. Through the lawsuits, Grossberg has produced several recordings made during her time at Fox that expose how transparently members of Trump’s circle lied about election fraud claims. In the interview, she revealed that she is in possession of a total of 90 recordings made during her time at the network. 

Fox News has called Grossberg’s allegations about her Dominion testimony “baseless” and stated that they are prepared to “vigorously defend Fox against all of her legal claims which have no merit.” 

On MSNBC, Grossberg elaborated on her claims that Carlson had created a hostile work environment rampant with sexist discrimination behind the scenes of his show. Carlson was ousted from Fox News in a shocking move by the network on Monday, with no explanation given as to the cause of his sudden departure. 

“Tucker and his executive producer Justin Wells, who was also fired, really were responsible for breaking me and making my life a living hell. So there is a feeling of justice, but it’s only partial,” Grossberg said in her discussion of Carlson’s departure from Fox. 

Despite her sense of partial vindication, Grossberg remains just as mystified as the public as to the network’s reason for parting ways with their biggest star. “I think [the lawsuits have] something to do with it,” Grossberg said, adding that she can’t “know for sure though.”  

What Grossberg does know, however, is her experience working behind the scenes of the most toxic show in the history of cable news. She described the frat-style culture of Tucker Carlson Tonight, whose offices at Fox’s studios were littered with photos of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in swimsuits.

The former producer said she was punished and demoted for speaking out against the “bro-fest” culture of Carlson’s team. “Whenever I said something like that, it put a target on my back and gradually I was shut out of meetings, I was mocked, I was eventually demoted. That’s how it played out for me. It got worse and worse and worse every time I spoke out.”

 

 

America Just Needs To Get Her Story Straight And Compel The World To Swallow It!!!

WaPo  |  In the long contest ahead with Russia and China, U.S. military power will be of greatest importance, but non-military instruments of power will be essential to our ability to compete and win as well. The most crucial such instrument is economic, the importance of which is widely recognized, as both the executive branch and Congress work to promote strong growth and technological superiority.

We have, however, seriously neglected other instruments of power that were fundamental to winning the Cold War: telling our story to the world, telling the truth to populations of countries ruled by authoritarian governments and exposing disinformation spread by those same governments.

Strategic communications and engagement with foreign publics and leaders are essential to shaping the global political environment in ways that support and advance American national interests. In this crucial arena of the competition, however, Russia and China are running rings around us.

Russia’s militarized bid to reverse the Cold War verdict and resurrect its empire has relied heavily on propaganda and disinformation to spread false narratives among its own people and those outside its borders, as well as to undermine the West’s coherence and resolve. Because Russia has no positive narrative to offer, its strategic communications aimed at other countries mainly attack the United States and the West, and serve as spoilers intended to disrupt and divide. 

China has taken a far more comprehensive approach. It has built an extraordinary global strategic communications and foreign influence operation, committing huge sums of money to building a modern media apparatus aimed at domestic and world audiences. China’s Xinhua News Agency has nearly 180 bureaus globally (and there is not a single country on the planet that is not reached by one or more Chinese radio, television or online outlets). Chinese companies buy stakes in domestic media outlets in numerous countries, especially in Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia. Chinese TV and radio broadcasts, websites and publications are readily available in the United States, but there is no reciprocity in China. More than 500 Confucius Institutes, ostensibly established to promote Chinese language and culture, spread China’s message around the world. The scale of the overall endeavor — and multiple mechanisms used — is without parallel.

In stark contrast, the United States after the Cold War largely dismantled its strategic communications and engagement capabilities. The U.S. Information Agency, our primary instrument to engage foreign publics throughout the Cold War, with a presence in 150 countries, was eliminated in 1999. Parts of it were parceled out to the State Department, and most of our know-how and key structures for engaging foreign publics were left to atrophy. The lack of priority attention to American strategic communications and engagement over the years is demonstrated most vividly by the fact that the undersecretary position in the State Department charged with overseeing these efforts has not had a Senate-confirmed occupant 40 percent of the time since it was created in 1999 and 90 percent of the time under Donald Trump and President Biden.

U.S. strategic communications and public diplomacy are fragmented among 14 agencies and 48 commissions. Yet, the State Department, which ought to be driving this train, lacks not just necessary resources in dollars and people but also, importantly, the authority to coordinate, integrate and synchronize these disparate and unfocused efforts. Further, there is no government-wide international communications and engagement strategy, and certainly no sense of urgency. In short, the country that invented public relations is being out-communicated around the world by an authoritarian Russia and increasingly totalitarian China.

Our approach must be different from theirs. Our advantage over the Soviet Union in strategic communications during the Cold War was that the USIA and our radio broadcasters such as Voice of America simply told the truth. We must continue to do so. However, in those days we had eager audiences in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe. The global audience today is more skeptical, so we must develop new approaches to effectively deliver our message.

The solution is not to re-create the USIA — the world has moved on. But a number of measures can be taken to dramatically improve the current lamentable state of affairs, some strategic, others operational. Many of them the president could implement immediately, while others would require congressional action.

When We Leak It's News, When You Leak It's Treason!!!

racket  |  On a flight, reading about the FBI’s arrest of Jack Texiera, already dubbed the “Pentagon Leaker.” A quick review reveals multiple media portraits already out depicting him as a dangerous incel who shared his wares on Discord, a social media app where “racist memes” and “offensive jokes” flourish. Writes the New York Times:

Dark humor about race or ideology can eventually shape the beliefs of impressionable young people, and innocuous memes can be co-opted into symbols of hatred, researchers say.

Well, clearly we can’t have dark humor or innocuous memes! Gitmo cages for all!

The Washington Post went with “charismatic gun enthusiast”:

The New York Times summarized key points in the secret defense documents, which among other things suggested “Ukrainian forces are in more dire straits than their government has acknowledged publicly.” Reading what’s out there, it’s not easy to parse what’s a legitimate intelligence concern in reaction to these leaks and what’s mere embarrassment at having been caught lying, to the public, to would-be U.S. allies the documents show we’ve been spying on, etc.

You’ll read a lot in the coming days about the dangers of apps like Discord, or of online gaming groups, which counterintelligence officials told the Washington Post today are a “magnet for spies.” The Leaker tale will also surely be framed as reason to pass the RESTRICT Act, the wet dream of creepazoid Virginia Senator Mark Warner, which would give government wide latitude to crack down on “communication technology” creating “undue or unacceptable risk” to national security.

The intelligence community has itself been massively interfering in domestic news using illegal leaks for years. Remember the “Why Did Obama Dawdle on Russia’s Hacking?” story by David Ignatius of the Washington Post in January of 2017, outing would-be Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn as having been captured in intercepts speaking with a Russian ambassador? That was just the first in a string of leak- or intercept-based news stories that dominated news cycles in the Trump years, involving everything from conclusions of the FISA court to supposedly secret meetings in the Seychelles.

When civilians or whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange (in jail for an incredible four years now), Reality Winner and now the “Discord Leaker” bring leaked information to the public, the immediate threat is Espionage Act charges and decades of jail time. When a CIA head or a top FBI official does it, it’s just news. In fact, officials talk openly about using “strategic leaks” as a P.R. staple. In a world where media currency is becoming the ultimate power, these people want a monopoly. It’s infuriating.

Watch how this thing will be spun. It’s going to get ugly fast.

Seine Papieren Bitte: Memory Holed Indeed Cept For My Blanket Exemption Papers...,

brownstone  |  On a video podcast the other day, I made reference to the lockdown orders of March 2020. The host turned off the recording. He said it was fine to talk about this subject but from now on please refer to “the events of March 2020” with no specifics. 

Otherwise, it will be taken down by YouTube and Facebook. He needs those platforms for reach, and reach is necessary for his business model. 

I complied, but I was spooked. Are we really now in the position that talking about what happened to us is verboten on mainstream venues? Sadly, that seems to be where we headed. In big and small ways, and throughout the culture and the whole world, we are bit by bit being trained to forget and hence not learn and thus repeat the whole thing. 

This makes no sense since nearly every public issue in play today traces to those fateful days and the fallout thereof, including censorship, the entrenchment of industry-government oligarchs, the corruption of media and tech, the educational upheaval, the abuse of courts and law, and the developing financial and banking crisis. 

And yet hardly anyone wants to speak about the topic frankly. It is too upsetting. There is too much at stake. We cannot risk being canceled, the single greatest fear of every aspirational professional in today’s world. Plus too many powerful people were in on it and don’t want to admit it. It would appear that the whole subject is being memoryholed in ways of which they all approve. 

For nearly two years, or longer, respectable intellectuals knew not to dissent from the prevailing norms and challenge the whole machinery. This was true of Washington think tanks, which went on their merry way from March 2020 either celebrating the “public health response” or just remaining quiet. The same was true of the leadership of major political parties and third parties. 

Most religious leaders stayed quiet too, even as their doors were padlocked for as long as 2 holiday seasons. Civic organizations played along. If you thought that the job of the ACLU was to defend civil liberties, you were wrong: they one day decided that lockdowns, mandatory masks, and forced shots were essential to their mission. 

So many were compromised over 3 years. These same people now just want the whole subject to go away. We find ourselves in an odd position, having experienced the biggest trauma in our lives and in many generations and yet there is precious little open talk about it. Brownstone was established to fill this void but we’ve become a target as a result.

If You Don't Like The Status Quo You Have No One To Vote For - Just People To Vote Against

neuburger  |  To answer that question seriously, consider the following premises. I think the first four accurately describe the thinking of mainstream Democratic leaders since the humiliating presidential loss of 2016:

1. Modern Republicans (leaders, media, and crucially, their voters as well) represent the worst threat to the American Republic since the Civil War.

   1. Or possibly since the Founding. Southern Confederates didn’t wish to institute Hitlerian reforms that would eliminate democracy from the governance of the state.

2. Any act by any individual or organization that advances the overall Republican Project, inadvertently or not, is as dangerous as the Project itself.

3. Because the Republican Project is evil, its supporters are evil — or in the most generous cases, deeply stupid.

4. Stopping the Republican Project means stopping all supporters and adherents, be they willing or not.

5. (Taibbi addendum 1) Matt Taibbi is a supporter, willingly or not, and therefore must be stopped.

6. (Taibbi addendum 2) Because his support is probably not inadvertent — Seder’s hosts and the Democratic committee members are certain his motive is money, a sell-out to advance Elon Musk — destruction of his entire career is a reasonable response. After all, the whole of American democracy is at risk; literally all.

I don’t think any of those statements, stark as they are, misrepresent the Democratic Party position. Everything I’ve observed since November 2016 confirms them all.

The Problem in a Nutshell

Statement 1 could well be true. I believe it myself, though about the leadership only. (I have other thoughts about Republican voters.)

But does the rest follow from that? Does it justify the destruction of free speech, to take one example, in order to preserve it? (If you doubt that’s what’s on offer, click the link.)

And even if it does, even if the means are justified by the end, the problem is that this Democratic Party response — this hate-Republicans-at-all-costs messaging (while party leaders themselves cut deals with them) — is not going to work. It won't blast them past their electoral opponents at near the speed it ought to, given their opponent's obvious and fatal flaws.

Mainstream Democrats run roughly even with Republicans except in protected districts. They certainly ran roughly even with Donald Trump in the only venue that counts, the Electoral College. And Democratic leaders are the reason that this is so. Will all this vitriol make them more attractive, or less?

If you don’t like the status quo, you have no one to vote for, just people to vote against.

What do you think would happen if Democrats ran a candidate of Real Rebellion, a Bernie Sanders, say, à la 2016, against the candidate of Pretending to Care what happens to suffering voters? Would real rebellion against predatory rule by the rich “trump” fake rebellion financed by the rich?

Of course it would. Sanders would have beaten Trump soundly, had he had the chance, in the 2016 race. All the momentum was his, and he won almost every head-to-head primary contest in states with open, same-day primary voting.

But Democrats, the other party of the rich, won’t take that course. Which leaves them only one pitch. In Taibbi’s language from the start of this piece:

It’s always “Vote for us or you’re a right-wing insurrectionist Putin-lover,” which is the opposite of persuasive.

This is the Democrats’ constant closing argument, and the worst they could advance. It makes them, not just wrong, but ugly as well, the “opposite of persuasive.” Yet this is all they have, if they can’t themselves attack the people’s real enemy, and this time actually mean it. Sad for us. Sad for them as well.

 

We Saw Matt Taibbi vs. Congressional DNC - Now Matt Taibbi vs. MSNBC

racket  |   I’m going to be interviewed on MSNBC today by Mehdi Hasan, the author of a book called Win Every Argument. I’m looking forward to it as one would a root canal or a rectal.

I accepted the invitation because it would have been wrong to refuse, on the off chance he was planning a good-faith discussion. If you’re reading this, things have gone another way.

I last appeared on MSNBC six years ago, on January 13, 2017, to talk with Chris Hayes and of all people Malcolm Nance, about the then-burgeoning Trump-Russia scandal.

The Trump-Russia story was white-hot and still in its infancy. That same day, news leaked from Israel that Americans warned the Mossad not to share information with the incoming administration, because Russia had “leverages of pressure” on Trump. Asked by Chris about the scandal generally, I made what I thought was a boring-but-true observation, that we in the media didn’t “have any hard evidence” of a conspiracy, just not a lot to go on. This was the TV equivalent of a shrug.

Nance jumped on this in a way I remember feeling was unexpected and oddly personal. “Matt’s a journalist. I’m an intelligence officer,” he snapped. “There is no such thing as coincidence in my world.” Chris jumped in to note reporters have different standards, and I agreed, saying, “We haven’t seen anything that allows us to say unequivocally that x and y happened last year.”

“Unequivocally” seemed to trigger Nance. With regard to the DNC hack, he said, “That evidence is unequivocal. It’s on the Internet.” As for “these links possibly with the Trump team,” he proclaimed, “You’re probably never going to see the CIA’s report.” Nance went on to answer “no” to a question from Chris about whether leaks “were coming from the intelligence community,” Chris wrapped up with a sensible suggestion that we all not rely on a parade of “leaks and counter-leaks,” and the segment was done.

To this day I get hit probably a hundred times a day with the question, “What happened to you, man?” What happened? That segment happened, but to MSNBC, not me.

That exchange between Nance and me was symbolic of a choice the network faced. They could either keep doing what reporters had done since the beginning of time, confining themselves to saying things they could prove. Or, they could adopt a new approach, in which you can say anything is true or confirmed, so long as a politician or intelligence official told you it was.

We know how that worked out. I was never invited back, nor for a long time was any other traditionally skeptical reporter, while Nance — one of the most careless spewers of provable errors ever to appear on a major American news network — became one of the Peacock’s most familiar faces.

Unaccountable Algorithmic Tyranny

alt-market |  In this article I want to stress the issue of AI governance and how it might be made to appeal to the masses. In order to achieve the dystopian future the globalists want, they still have to convince a large percentage of the population to applaud it and embrace it.

The comfort of having a system that makes difficult decisions for us is an obvious factor, as mentioned above. But, AI governance is not just about removing choice, it’s also about removing the information we might need to be educated enough to make choices. We saw this recently with the covid pandemic restrictions and the collusion between governments, corporate media and social media. Algorithms were widely used by web media conglomerates from Facebook to YouTube to disrupt the flow of information that might run contrary to the official narrative.

In some cases the censorship targeted people merely asking pertinent questions or fielding alternative theories. In other cases, the censorship outright targeted provably factual data that was contrary to government policies. A multitude of government claims on covid origins, masking, lockdowns and vaccines have been proven false over the past few years, and yet millions of people still blindly believe the original narrative because they were bombarded with it nonstop by the algorithms. They were never exposed to the conflicting information, so they were never able to come to their own conclusions.

Luckily, unlike bots, human intelligence is filled with anomalies – People who act on intuition and skepticism in order to question preconceived or fabricated assertions. The lack of contrary information immediately causes suspicion for many, and this is what authoritarian governments often refuse to grasp.

The great promise globalists hold up in the name of AI is the idea of a purely objective state; a social and governmental system without biases and without emotional content. It’s the notion that society can be run by machine thinking in order to “save human beings from themselves” and their own frailties. It is a false promise, because there will never be such a thing as objective AI, nor any AI that understand the complexities of human psychological development.

Furthermore, the globalist dream of AI is driven not by adventure, but by fear. It’s about the fear of responsibility, the fear of merit, the fear of inferiority, the fear of struggle and the fear of freedom. The greatest accomplishments of mankind are admirable because they are achieved with emotional content, not in spite of it. It is that content that inspires us to delve into the unknown and overcome our fears. AI governance and an AI integrated society would be nothing more than a desperate action to deny the necessity of struggle and the will to overcome.

Globalists are more than happy to offer a way out of the struggle, and they will do it with AI as the face of their benevolence. All you will have to do is trade your freedoms and perhaps your soul in exchange for never having to face the sheer terror of your own quiet thoughts. Some people, sadly, believe this is a fair trade.

The elites will present AI as the great adjudicator, the pure and logical intercessor of the correct path; not just for nations and for populations at large but for each individual life. With the algorithm falsely accepted as infallible and purely unbiased, the elites can then rule the world through their faceless creation without any oversight – For they can then claim that it’s not them making decisions, it’s the AI.  How does one question or even punish an AI for being wrong, or causing disaster? And, if the AI happens to make all its decisions in favor of the globalist agenda, well, that will be treated as merely coincidental.

Disingenuously Shaping The Narrative Around Large Language Model Computing

vice  |  More than 30,000 people—including Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, politician Andrew Yang, and a few leading AI researchers—have signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. 

The letter immediately caused a furor as signatories walked back their positions, some notable signatories turned out to be fake, and many more AI researchers and experts vocally disagreed with the letter’s proposal and approach. 

The letter was penned by the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit organization with the stated mission to “reduce global catastrophic and existential risk from powerful technologies.” It is also host to some of the biggest proponents of longtermism, a kind of secular religion boosted by many members of the Silicon Valley tech elite since it preaches seeking massive wealth to direct towards problems facing humans in the far future. One notable recent adherent to this idea is disgraced FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. 

Specifically, the institute focuses on mitigating long-term "existential" risks to humanity such as superintelligent AI. Musk, who has expressed longtermist beliefs, donated $10 million to the institute in 2015.  

“Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4,” the letter states. “AI labs and independent experts should use this pause to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts.”

“This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities,” the letter clarifies, referring to the arms race between big tech companies like Microsoft and Google, who in the past year have released a number of new AI products. 

Other notable signatories include Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, author and historian Yuval Noah Harari, and Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp. There are also a number of people who work for the companies participating in the AI arms race who have signed, including Google DeepMind and Microsoft. All signatories were confirmed to Motherboard by the Future of Life Institute to be “independently verified through direct communication.” No one from OpenAI, which develops and commercializes the GPT series of AI models, has signed the letter. 

Despite this verification process, the letter started out with a number of false signatories, including people impersonating OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Chinese president Xi Jinping, and Chief AI Scientist at Meta, Yann LeCun, before the institute cleaned the list up and paused the appearance of signatures on the letter as they verify each one. 

The letter has been scrutinized by many AI researchers and even its own signatories since it was published on Tuesday. Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, who told Reuters “the letter isn’t perfect, but the spirit is right.” Similarly, Emad Mostaque, the CEO of Stability.AI, who has pitted his firm against OpenAI as a truly "open" AI company, tweeted, “So yeah I don't think a six month pause is the best idea or agree with everything but there are some interesting things in that letter.” 

AI experts criticize the letter as furthering the “AI hype” cycle, rather than listing or calling for concrete action on harms that exist today. Some argued that it promotes a longtermist perspective, which is a worldview that has been criticized as harmful and anti-democratic because it valorizes the uber-wealthy and allows for morally dubious actions under certain justifications.

Emily M. Bender, a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington and the co-author of the first paper the letter cites, tweeted that this open letter is “dripping with #Aihype” and that the letter misuses her research. The letter says, “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research,” but Bender counters that her research specifically points to current large language models and their use within oppressive systems—which is much more concrete and pressing than hypothetical future AI. 

“We wrote a whole paper in late 2020 (Stochastic Parrots, published in 2021) pointing out that this head-long rush to ever larger language models without considering risks was a bad thing. But the risks and harms have never been about ‘too powerful AI’,” she tweeted. “Instead: They're about concentration of power in the hands of people, about reproducing systems of oppression, about damage to the information ecosystem, and about damage to the natural ecosystem (through profligate use of energy resources).” 

“It's essentially misdirection: bringing everyone's attention to hypothetical powers and harms of LLMs and proposing a (very vague and ineffective) way of addressing them, instead of looking at the harms here and now and addressing those—for instance, requiring more transparency when it comes to the training data and capabilities of LLMs, or legislation regarding where and when they can be used,” Sasha Luccioni, a Research Scientist and Climate Lead at Hugging Face, told Motherboard.

Don't Sleep On That Tablet Anti-Disinformation Grand Opus

racket  |  Years ago, when I first began to have doubts about the Trump-Russia story, I struggled to come up with a word to articulate my suspicions.

If the story was wrong, and Trump wasn’t a Russian spy, there wasn’t a word for what was being perpetrated. This was a system-wide effort to re-frame reality itself, which was both too intellectually ambitious to fit in a word like “hoax,” but also probably not against any one law, either. New language would have to be invented just to define the wrongdoing, which not only meant whatever this was would likely go unpunished, but that it could be years before the public was ready to talk about it.

Around that same time, writer Jacob Siegel — a former army infantry and intelligence officer who edits Tablet’s afternoon digest, The Scroll — was beginning the job of putting key concepts on paper. As far back as 2019, he sketched out the core ideas for a sprawling, illuminating 13,000-word piece that just came out this week. Called “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation,” Siegel’s Tablet article is the enterprise effort at describing the whole anti-disinformation elephant I’ve been hoping for years someone in journalism would take on.

It will escape no one’s notice that Siegel’s lede recounts the Hamilton 68 story from the Twitter Files. Siegel says the internal dialogues of Twitter executives about the infamous Russia-tracking “dashboard” helped him frame the piece he’d been working on for so long. Which is great, I’m glad about that, but he goes far deeper into the topic than I have, and in a way that has a real chance to be accessible to all political audiences.

Siegel threads together all the disparate strands of a very complex story, in which the sheer quantity of themes is daunting: the roots in counter-terrorism strategy, Russiagate as a first great test case, the rise of a public-private “counter-disinformation complex” nurturing an “NGO Borg,” the importance of Trump and “domestic extremism” as organizing targets, the development of a new uniparty politics anointing itself “protector” of things like elections, amid many other things.

He concludes with an escalating string of anxiety-provoking propositions. One is that our first windows into this new censorship system, like Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, might also be our last, as AI and machine learning appear ready to step in to do the job at scale. The National Science Foundation just announced it was “building a set of use cases” to enable ChatGPT to “further automate” the propaganda mechanism, as Siegel puts it. The messy process people like me got to see, just barely, in the outlines of Twitter emails made public by a one-in-a-million lucky strike, may not appear in recorded human conversations going forward. “Future battles fought through AI technologies,” says Siegel, “will be harder to see.”

More unnerving is the portion near the end describing how seemingly smart people are fast constructing an ideology of mass surrender. Siegel recounts the horrible New York Times Magazine article (how did I forget it?) written by Yale law graduate Emily Bazelon just before the 2020 election, whose URL is titled “The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation.” Shorter Bazelon could have been Fox Nazis Censorship Derp: the article the Times really ran was insanely long and ended with flourishes like, “It’s time to ask whether the American way of protecting free speech is actually keeping us free.”

Both the actors in the Twitter Files and the multitudinous papers produced by groups like the Aspen Institute and Harvard’s Shorenstein Center are perpetually concerned with re-thinking the “problem” of the First Amendment, which of course is not popularly thought of as a problem. It’s notable that the Anti-Disinformation machine, a clear sequel to the Military-Industrial Complex, doesn’t trumpet the virtues of the “free world” but rather the “rules-based international order,” within which (as Siegel points out) people like former Labor Secretary Robert Reich talk about digital deletion as “necessary to protect American democracy.” This idea of pruning fingers off democracy to save it is increasingly popular; we await the arrival of the Jerzy Kozinski character who’ll propound this political gardening metaphor to the smart set.

How Concerned Will The Anglo Establishment Become About Democracy In Israel?

korybko  |  At all costs, America believes that it must do whatever’s necessary to prevent the Israeli state from exercising its sovereign right under Bibi’s restored leadership to balance between the US-led West’s Golden Billion and the Sino-Russo Entente instead of decisively take the former’s side against the latter. Most immediately, its “deep state” wants Israel to arm Kiev, which Bibi himself warned earlier this month could abruptly catalyze a crisis with Russia in Syria.  

It's precisely this outcome that the US wants to have happen because it could open a so-called “second front” in its Eurasian-wide “containment’ campaign against Russia after the most recent efforts to do so in Georgia and Moldova have thus far failed. Furthermore, a major crisis in West Asia could impede the region’s accelerated rise as an independent pole of influence in the emerging Multipolar World Order, the scenario of which became viable after the Chinese-mediated Iranian-Saudi rapprochement.

That aforementioned development coupled with Bibi’s envisaged multi-alignment between the US-led West’s Golden Billion and the Sino-Russo Entente could lead to the near-total loss of American influence over West Asia, especially if Israel starts de-dollarizing its trade like Saudi Arabia is soon expected to do. Simply put, the entire region’s future role in the ongoing global systemic transition is at stake, thus explaining the grand strategic significance of Israel’s US-exacerbated crisis.

The socio-political (soft security) dynamics aren’t in Bibi’s favor, which could lead to him either backing down or being overthrown, with either of those outcomes raising the chances that Israel submits to being the US’ New Cold War vassal instead of continuing its trajectory as an independent player. If the military (hard security) dynamics become more difficult such as in the event of a tacitly US-approved Intifada, then his removal could be a fait accompli unless he succeeds in imposing a military dictatorship.

So as not to be misunderstood, the preceding scenario doesn’t imply that the Palestinian cause is illegitimate, but just that it can be exploited by the US like all others in advance of its larger interests. In any case, the situation is extremely combustible and it’s difficult to predict what’ll happen next. Nothing like this has ever happened before in Israel, neither domestically nor in terms of its ties with the US. This is literally unprecedented, especially in terms of its impact on International Relations as explained.

How Synthetic Sexual Identities Got Fast Tracked Through American Institutions

nationalreview |  What campaigners mean by “trans rights” is gender self-identification: that trans people be treated in every circumstance as members of the sex they identify with, rather than the sex they actually are.

This is not a human right at all. It is a demand that everyone else lose their rights to single-sex spaces, services, and activities. And in its requirement that everyone else accept trans people’s subjective beliefs as objective reality, it is akin to a new state religion, complete with blasphemy laws.

Even as one country after another introduces gender self-ID, very few voters know that this is happening, let alone support it.

In 2018 research by Populus, an independent pollster, crowdfunded by British feminists, found that only 15 percent of British adults agreed that legal sex change should be possible without a doctor’s sign-off. A majority classified a “person who was born male and has male genitalia but who identifies as a woman” as a man, and only tiny minorities said that such people should be allowed into women’s sports or changing rooms, or be incarcerated in a women’s prison if they committed a crime.

Two years later, YouGov found that half of British voters thought people should be “able to self-identify as a different gender to the one they were born in.” But two-thirds said legal sex change should only be possible with a doctor’s sign-off, with just 15 percent saying no sign-off should be needed. In other words, there is widespread support for people describing themselves as they wish, but not much for granting such self-descriptions legal status. The same poll also asked whether transwomen should be allowed in women’s sports and changing rooms, sometimes with a reminder that transwomen may have had no genital surgery, and sometimes without. The share saying yes was 20 percentage points lower with the reminder than without — again demonstrating widespread confusion about what being trans means, and that support for trans people does not imply support for self-declaration overriding reality.

A poll in Scotland in 2020 suggests that even young women, the demographic keenest on gender self-ID, become cooler when reminded of the practical implications. A slight majority of women aged 16 to 34 selected “anyone who says they’re a woman, regardless of their biology” as closer than “an adult human female, with XX chromosomes and female genitalia” to their conception of what the word “woman” means. (Young men were much less keen on the self-ID definition, though keener than older men. Overall, 72 percent of respondents chose the biological definition.) But that 52 percent share fell to 38 percent answering “yes” to: “Do you think someone who identifies as a woman, but was born male, and still has male genitalia, should be allowed to use female changing rooms where women and girls are undressing/showering, even if those women object?”

This pattern of broad sympathy for trans-identified people combined with opposition to the practical consequences of gender self-ID also holds in the U.S. In 2020, public-opinion polling in ten swing states found that at least three-quarters of likely voters — including a majority of registered Democrats — opposed allowing male people to compete in female sports. Proposals to ban puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors also polled extremely well. Two more polls the same year, one in California shortly before state laws changed to grant male convicts who identified as women the right to be held in women’s prisons, and one in Idaho to gauge support for the state legislature’s efforts to keep males out of women’s sports, found large majorities supporting separation by sex rather than gender identity.

Gender self-ID does not even play well with left-leaning voters. In early 2020, Eric Kaufmann, a politics professor, gave a random sample of likely British voters some text about a “trans rights” pledge signed by all but one of the candidates for the Labour Party leadership. It described women’s groups campaigning to maintain sex-based rights as “trans exclusionist hate groups,” and said Labour members supporting them should be expelled. The share who said they were likely to vote Labour at the next election was ten percentage points lower than in a control group who read nothing. Progressive campaigners have used “taboos around minority sensitivity to amplify their influence,” Kaufmann concluded, enabling them to “advance unpopular platforms that both weaken the Left and contribute to cultural polarisation.”

Making Snow Black: When We Act - We Create Our Own Reality

strategic-culture |  The infamous Carl Rove (we shall not bother with an explanatory note, whoever remembers this cowboy and is still interested may look him up) twenty and some years ago articulated the gist of the empire’s swaggering ideology:

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Students of “empire” must wonder indeed how this foolish man, if he is still around, would now comment his erstwhile utterance. The empire in whose name Rove arrogantly spoke a quarter of a century ago lies in shambles; its reality-producing powers seem notably diminished. If the pretentious nincompoop Rove had any notion of history, he would probably acknowledge that the lifespan of his empire had been even shorter than Assyria’s, its ephemeral prototype from antiquity.

The crude vulgarity of Rove’s boasting should not, however, obscure the fact that a similar disdain for reality was articulated before him by Lord Bertrand Russell, by any measure a genuinely substantial figure. In his 1953 treatise “The Impact of Science on Society,” the sophisticated intellectual Russell wrote up a much more polished and cynical version of Rove’s plebeian ranting:

“The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of schoolchildren on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black” (Page 33).

The effort to invert reality and produce just such an unshakable conviction is in full operation in the terminally sick community of nations Dostoevsky charitably referred to as “the precious graveyard,” now known also as the Collective West.

The West’s newest ideological fad is reality inversion. Another way of putting it is that the most compelling expression of fealty to the West’s values consists of vociferously denying the evidence of one’s senses.

Proof abounds. The dogma propagated in February of this year at an “educational” workshop sponsored by Oklahoma State University was that the biological fact that chromosomes determine an individual’s gender is of no significance. It was expected that on, the contrary, the participants should embrace the unshakable conviction that gender, besides being multiple, was also a matter of arbitrary self-determination. Ideology “cancels” facts. Members of the scientific community and students of biology who, in order to pass their exams, until recently considered it advantageous to affirm empirical facts about the role of chromosomes, are henceforth required to recalibrate scientific knowledge, making it conform to ideological criteria. Who can blame readers who used to be citizens of another empire, denounced not long ago as “evil,” if they find such abrupt reversals of officially approved reality uncomfortable, or even traumatising?

The pandemonium triggered at Portland State University when a biologist contended that there were “explicitly anatomical and biological” differences between men and women, and that taking offense at that constitutes “rejection of reality,” richly illustrates the depth of the madness to which the West has descended.

To summarise, the party line now is that it is not objective factors such as chromosomes that determine gender but “one’s internal sense of being male, female, neither of these, both, or another gender(s) … for transgender people, their sex assigned at birth and their own internal sense of gender identity are not the same. Female, woman, and girl and male, man, and boy are also not necessarily linked to each other but are just six common gender identities.” In other words, one “is” the way one “feels” and the feeling need not be anchored in external reality. (See here.)

Culture Control Is Practiced Through Public Relations And Advertising

Since 2013 the U.S. government has been freed to direct lies, propaganda and psychological operations against American people domestically.  Here is something to help explain why the MSM is nothing but propaganda, and how long the media has been used against the American people, and why it may never change in the US and the collective west.

Western narrative hegemony is planned, created and controlled by the same people who run Defense (War) , Foreign Policy (imperialism),  Police (private militia to control LOCAL populations) and Finance (the means of extracting wealth from the masses).

Elite House Slaves manage all of the above. Relatives and private school friends work in each of these areas of activity and they make up the Permanent State. This organizing set of affiliations is the same throughout the Collective West's poisonous Garden. 

Elite House Slaves make up narratives and sell them through both contemporary and traditional pulpits - using velvet gloves to cover their hoary claws. They bring out the Gauntlets when peasants get restless and put forth grassroots responses.

Elite House Slaves are obvious to those of us who have somehow managed to break away from the daily brainwashing.

phys.org  |  The manipulation of the American mind: Edward Bernays and the birth of public relations [Bernays] chose a career in journalism, eventually helping the Woodrow Wilson Administration promote the idea that US efforts in World War I were intended to bring democracy to Europe. Having seen how effective propaganda could be during war, Bernays wondered whether it might prove equally useful during peacetime. [However since] propaganda had acquired a pejorative connotation (which would be further magnified during World War II), so Bernays promoted the term “public relations.”

Drawing on the insights of his Uncle Sigmund – a relationship Bernays was always quick to mention – he developed an approach he dubbed “the engineering of consent.” He provided leaders the means to “control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it.” To do so, it was necessary to appeal not to the rational part of the mind, but the unconscious.

Even though Bernays saw the power of propaganda during war and used it to sell products during peacetime, he couldn’t have imagined that his writings on public relations would become a tool of the Third Reich.  In the 1920s, Joseph Goebbels became an avid admirer of Bernays and his writings – despite the fact that Bernays was a Jew. When Goebbels became the minister of propaganda for the Third Reich, he sought to exploit Bernays’ ideas to the fullest extent possible. For example, he created a “Fuhrer cult” around Adolph Hitler.

Bernays learned that the Nazis were using his work in 1933, from a foreign correspondent for Hearst newspapers. He later recounted in his 1965 autobiography: They were using my books as the basis for a destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me, but I knew any human activity can be used for social purposes or misused for antisocial ones.

What Bernays’ writings furnish is not a principle or tradition by which to evaluate the appropriateness of propaganda, but simply a means for shaping public opinion for any purpose whatsoever, whether beneficial to human beings or not.

This observation led Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter to warn President Franklin Roosevelt against allowing Bernays to play a leadership role in World War II, describing him and his colleagues as “professional poisoners of the public mind, exploiters of foolishness, fanaticism, and self-interest.”

Today we might call what Bernays pioneered a form of branding, but at its core it represents little more than a particularly brazen set of techniques to manipulate people to get them to do your bidding. Its underlying purpose, in large part, is to make money. By convincing people that they want something they do not need, Bernays sought to turn citizens and neighbors into consumers who use their purchasing power to propel themselves down the road to happiness.

Without a moral compass, however, such a transformation promotes a patronizing and ultimately cynical view of human nature and human possibilities, one as likely to destroy lives as to build them up.

foreignpolicy |  "For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government's mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. But on July 2, that came silently to an end with the implementation of a new reform passed in January. The result: an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for U.S. domestic propaganda efforts. So what just happened?"