'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

[MacCruiskeen]

^^ We need to pay much closer attention to whose interests are served by presenting this kind of obviously ridiculous, obviously detestable stuff -- incessantly, in the media -- as the image (the mediated spectacle) of "the left".

[Belligerent Savant]

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/orwell-was-right?s=r

Orwell Was Right

From free speech to "spheres of influence" to our passion for endless war, we've become the doublethinkers 1984 predicted

Matt Taibbi
13 hr ago

[Belligerent Savant]

.

This comment compliments some of my earlier sentiment upthread:

@gnocchiwizard
·
...big left cities were all too happy to embrace an apartheid system that excluded me from activities like working or going to a damn restaurant, and from coast to coast i found right wing places where people sympathized and welcomed me, even if i was only passing through.

https://twitter.com/gnocchiwizard/statu ... WGtljP2cpQ

At this moment, I can visit/patronize practically any establishment in NYC, but my employer still forbids me from entering their NYC office building or interacting with my fellow co-workers, regardless of my prior infection status, because I didn't submit to an mRNA product.

Along similar lines, I've never felt "otherized" whenever I traveled outside of "Blue" cities over the last ~2 yrs.

Related:

@kiley_holliday

Replying to @EWoodhouse7 and @jeffreyatucker

Letting Irving in the building but refusing to let him play makes about as much sense as the decision to continue masking toddlers. I hope @NYCMayor is proud to be representing the party of Science™️ at this very embarrassing moment.

https://twitter.com/kiley_holliday/stat ... WGtljP2cpQ

[stickdog99]

[Belligerent Savant]

"It's overwhelmingly a far-right phenomenon": Noam Chomsky explains why so many Americans will not get "vaccinated"

Once again, America's most famous "leftist" has many wondering if he was always such a dope

Mark Crispin Miller
March 23

Can someone who cares about him, and his legacy, not step in, for his sake, and get him to shut up? How one would do that I have no idea, since he thinks his every word is genius, and that anyone who disagrees with him is stupid. As one who’s tried to argue with him (about Bush/Cheney’s election theft), and who was privy to an epic back-and-forth with him on 9/11 (which he thinks went down as advertised), I can tell you from firsthand experience (nor am I the only one who can) that Chomsky never actually addresses counter-evidence, but, metaphorically speaking, just sails up high above it—high enough to gaze down at anyone who dares present it to him—and calls it wrong. It’s a mode of “disputation” all his own, which I call “argument by levitation.”

So there’s actually no way to tell Noam Chomsky that he’s (please forgive my rudeness) full of shit, because he knows everything, so if you tell him something that he doesn’t know, it must be wrong, there being nothing that he doesn’t know. Thus Chomsky knows that “vaccine hesitancy” is a “far-right phenomenon,” and that the FDA and CDC are honest regulators of Big Pharma, just as he’s always known that JFK’s assassination didn’t matter (“Who cares?” he once said on that subject, publicly), and that 9/11 WAS the doing of 19 Muslim zealots, and that Bush/Cheney’s election theft was no big deal (he once told me this himself), and—astoundingly—that “January 6th” was an “attempted coup,” which he’s compared to Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch, asserting, with his usual clueless over-confidence, that “historians of fascism” all agree with that ridiculous equation. (What “January 6th” does recall from Hitler’s meteoric history is the burning of the Reichstag.) Chomsky also knows that the Republican Party—not, say, the CIA, or the Nazis, or the World Economic Forum—is “the most dangerous organization in human history,” and (of course) that Donald Trump is just like Adolf Hitler.

If this were just about the 93-year-old Noam Chomsky, it would be appropriate to turn a tactfully blind eye to this latest imbecility, offensive though it is. (Does he actually believe that all those “vaccine-hesitant” Americans—all those black Americans, and Hispanics—are out on the “far right”?) However, this is not just about that ruined “leftist” sage, but about what calls itself “the left” today, since nearly everybody who “identifies as” being on “the left” today appears to worship him, and therefore swallows even his astonishingly cruel and ignorant pronouncements on how anyone who will not get injected is a fascist—when, in fact, this lethal “vaccine” program is itself a patently fascistic project, and Chomsky’s fierce endorsement of that project is fascistic, too.

There may by at least one or more persons here in RI that agree with 'ol Noam's take on Jan 6th, eh? Despite the passage of time and clear indications that it was yet another largely staged event.

https://markcrispinmiller.substack.com/ ... omenon?s=r

[Belligerent Savant]

[Harvey]

^ Via https://www.larkenrose.com/blog/tmds-bl ... y-out.html

The more tyrants pillage, the more they crave, the more they ruin and destroy; the more one yields to them, and obeys them, by that much do they become mightier and more formidable, the readier to annihilate and destroy.
But if not one thing is yielded to them, if, without any violence they are simply not obeyed, they become naked and undone and as nothing.
All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is.
He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body
He has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you.
Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves?
How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you?
The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own?
How does he have any power over you except through you?
How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you?
What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves?
You can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free.
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed.
I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.

Étienne de La Boétie

[Belligerent Savant]

^^^^^

It is indeed as simple as his insights lay out for us. But it also makes clear why propaganda and manipulation of sentiment is so critically important to those in power. They need to maintain the illusions, and to keep the populace in the dark and divided.

And right now there are far too many footsoldiers all too eager to placate the whims of the powerful. Those mentioned in this thread title were once advocates for the common man/woman.

That's largely no longer the case.

[Belligerent Savant]

@gnocchiwizard

liberals got bamboozled into demanding arms for nazi al qaeda paramilitaries and supporting perhaps the most nakedly corrupt oligarchy in the world.

10:08 AM · Mar 26, 2022

@Trapezohedron76
·
Replying to @gnocchiwizard

I dunno. That phrasing makes it sound like they put up some kind of resistance until they were successfully tricked somehow.

These people trick themselves.

[Harvey]

Ask not what your country can propagandise you to do, but what you can do to switch off the propaganda.

[conniption]

Toby Rogers
(embedded links)

Announcing a hostile takeover of the left

Current managers are hereby dismissed; the movement will be rebranded and relaunched with a focus on the issues that matter

Toby Rogers
Mar 26, 2022

I. We’ve seen this all before

In the run up to World War I, labor was ascendant and capital was prone to endless cycles of boom and bust. The Second International was a collection of socialist and labor parties from twenty different countries that ostensibly was building a global alternative to capitalism. When the war began, all that these groups had to do was to abide by their stated principles and tell their members to put class ahead of nationalism (‘don’t fight in capitalist wars’). The various nation states of Europe would have crumbled, ushering in the worker-led world that they had been trying to create for seventy years (since the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848). Instead, these socialist and labor parties succumbed to nationalism, providing the troops for what was at the time the bloodiest war in human history. The Second International collapsed and the left has been marginalized ever since.

All of the efforts to develop an enlightened ideology dissolved in the face of pure animal instincts and bloodlust. Nationalism trumped class. Lizard brain trumped rational brain. Cheap propaganda trumped decades of political organizing. On the precipice of achieving their dreams, the left found a way to take a dive and make capitalism more powerful than ever.

History is repeating itself. In the run up to the Covid wars, the left was ascendant. Women, LGBT, people of color, environmentalists, and unions had formed alliances that enabled them to take power throughout the developed world. When the Fauci-funded gain-of-function virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan all that they had to do was to practice their principles; distribute 20 safe, effective, and inexpensive treatments to anyone who needed them; and tell Pharma (the most corrupt industry on earth) to pound sand.

Instead the left collapsed morally and intellectually and became zombies enthusiastically helping Pharma to carry out global genocide.

II. Foreshadowing of the unraveling

Journalist and author Thomas Frank is beloved on the left and is one of its most insightful critics. His 2016 book, Listen Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? sounded the alarm that the Democratic Party in the U.S. (and left parties in general worldwide) had lost their working class base and now only represent the interests of highly educated technocrats — about 10% of the population. Listen Liberal thus foreshadowed Hillary Clinton’s defeat later that same year and even Joe Biden’s inability to govern effectively today.

Frank’s premise has gotten picked up by the left in the most peculiar way.

The Winter 2022 edition of Democracy: A journal of ideas has a cover story titled, “Winning without the Courts.” Progressives know that the Supreme Court is lost for at least a generation so they are proposing to find a work-around to advance their goals without it.

The entire winter edition of Jacobin, a glossy bougie Marxian magazine out of Brooklyn is about “The Left in Purgatory.” It laments the declining relevance of Bernie Sanders, AOC and the squad, and the Working Families Party in New York and wrestles with the question of how to do “working-class politics without the working class.”

Others on the mainstream left have noted that Latinos are abandoning the Democratic Party and that the Democratic share of the Black vote is declining as well.

In all of these critiques though, there is never any self-reflection, never any reckoning, never any demand to change course to meet people’s actual needs. Instead these articles are all about, how do we win without the courts, how do we win without the working class, how do we win without Latinos, Blacks, and women? The focus is always, hilariously, about messaging, as if tweaking a few words, but not the underlying ideology, would be enough to bring back the people who have rejected the party.

It all becomes like the Monty Python skit, “Just a flesh wound!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmInkxbvlCs

Apparently it never occurred to anyone on the left that perhaps they could be wrong.

III. Total collapse

The intellectual and moral collapse of the left accelerated and became complete in response to the pandemic. The left was handed a straightforward problem — a rogue federal bureaucrat, in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry, engineered a gain-of-function virus in collaboration with a Chinese bioweapons lab that got out and started killing millions of people.

To use a baseball analogy, this was a languid fastball right over the middle of the plate. The left should have been able to crush this pitch into the outfield bleachers. Arrest Fauci; distribute safe, cheap, and effective antiviral and antibacterial treatments that the CDC already knew would work against coronaviruses; nationalize Pharma; suspend trade relations with China; problem solved.

Of course Trump was President at the start of the pandemic. But Democrats were a government in waiting and just 8 months from taking power. That gave the left plenty of time to articulate a sane response and to begin implementing it in the 22 states that they control. Furthermore, Democrats controlled the institutions that were (and still are) in charge of pandemic response — FDA, CDC, state and local public health departments, mainstream medicine, and the corporate media. Given that there was almost no change in strategy when Biden took power, it shows that the Democratic plan was the official pandemic response from the beginning.

Handed a golden opportunity to show that the meritocratic, progressive, regulatory state could effectively govern when it actually matters, the left went full Pharma fascist instead. All logic, reason, and principles went out the window in an instant. The party became all lizard brain all the time and rushed to set up Pharma Jim Crow, Pharma Apartheid, and Pharma Fascism in any jurisdiction under their control. The Democratic Party became the point of the spear for the most deadly and corrupt industry on earth in violation of all of their anti-corporate principles.

Nothing they tried worked because nothing they did was based on actual science.

It was not just the Democratic politicians who succumbed to Pharma junk science and propaganda. The brightest scholars on the left, one by one, announced their hatred for logic and reason and their love for Pharma Fascism.

IV. Announcing a hostile takeover

In the corporate sector, when a company is underperforming, investors often stage a hostile takeover. They push out the current management, sell-off underperforming assets, and refocus the company on its core mission.

I’ve spent much of the last two years criticizing the left, pointing out the error in their ways, hoping that they will wake up. But it strikes me that there is a better alternative. I come from the left too and have just as much right to this intellectual space as they do. It is time to reclaim this movement and push out the Pharma Fascists.

So I’m announcing a hostile takeover of the left. The movement is underperforming, current leadership has completely lost its way. First we need to fire a bunch of people. Then I am going to jettison underperforming assets and refocus the brand on what matters.

You may be thinking whoa whoa, the left is not a corporation so one cannot just announce a hostile takeover. Are you sure about that? The climate change movement is funded by billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg (amongst others). The BLM campaign is funded by George Soros. Billionaire MacKenzie Scott funds Planned Parenthood. Democratic dark money groups spent $1.7 BILLION on the 2020 presidential election.

The left is definitely a corporation at this point and ripe for a hostile takeover.

V. Current managers are hereby dismissed

As of today, the following leaders are dismissed. This is not cancel culture, this is zero tolerance for actual Nazis.

Noam Chomsky. I loved Manufacturing Consent. Really solid work. Reagan and the CIA must have been displeased. But in 2020 you started to manufacture consent on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry. I get it. You’re old. Scared. Probably cannot read original source documents. But you should have been able to tell that the playbook is the same. Anyway, you flushed your legacy down the drain. Pack up your stuff and get out. We don’t ever want to hear from you again.

Naomi Klein. No Logo was a revelation. Your timing was perfect and you gave voice to the feelings of workers crushed by globalization. No Logo was the manifesto for the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 and likely helped build the ‘Teamsters and Turtles’ coalition. After that you pioneered left scholarship with multinational research teams and global multilingual book launches for Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything, and On Fire. Every book you wrote helped us to see the world more clearly.

But in 2022, when Trudeau brought the shock doctrine to Canada you cheered for the fascists and against the people. Working class people got trampled by jack booted thugs on horseback and you stayed silent. You expressed contempt for the truckers and adoration for the reactionary forces. It was the most stunning betrayal of principles I’ve ever seen and erased twenty-five years of scholarship in an instant. When the game was on the line, you sided with your bougie class interests and abandoned your principles. This changes everything, indeed.

Slavoj Žižek. Yeah you’re smart, you read everything. But watching you speak is like being in the front row of a Gallagher Smash-O-Matic show as people have to roll out sheets of plastic to avoid your spittle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErppAlOIGQE

Your schtick was always disingenuous because you use an if-by-whiskey style of argumentation that allows people to hear whatever they want to hear. I’m struck by the fact that of the thousands of pages that you read, and the hundreds-of-thousands of words that you utter at the drop of a hat, you cannot be bothered to read original source documents on masks, vaccines, or really any scientific aspect of coronavirus. Opining about Hegel without a firm grasp of statistics is just wankery.

Re-watching some of your interviews and speeches now I see that you are badly vaccine injured (the clues are the strabismus plus tics and other Tourette’s movements). I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. But what you do from here on out is your responsibility.

So brother, please put down whatever Lacan book you are reading and pick up Forrest Maready if you really want to begin the healing process.

Michael Moore. When Pharma started poisoning people in Michigan with their junk science mRNA products, how come you failed to apply your homespun investigative journalism skills to get to the heart of this matter? Interviewing Albert Bourla or Stéphane Bancel in your Roger-and-me style would have been another blockbuster documentary. Instead you went fascist and pissed on the Canadian truckers because you’re worth $30 million dollars and hate the peasants. Anyway, you’re done.

Every corporate Dem who worked for Clinton, Obama, or Biden. You were never progressive. You hijacked the movement to serve your own interests. You’re transactional, you do not actually believe in anything other than being in power. You were silent when the epidemics of chronic childhood illness took off in the 1990s and you’ve gone full fascist now under the guise of Covid. Nobody cares what you think because you don’t actually think. You’re already forgotten because you were never really here.

The entire left media infrastructure. NPR, Amy Goodman/Democracy Now, Media Matters, the Nation, Mother Jones, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, NYT, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC, Vice, BuzzFeed, HuffPo, every astroturf narrative check organization. You work for Pharma, you have no critical thinking skills, and you are actively participating in genocide. Find another job immediately or prepare for Nuremberg 2.

The billionaires. Behind every great fortune is a great crime. Nobody likes you. Go away.

Who would you add to this list?

VI. Sort the organic wheat from the chaff

It is an enormous problem that the left has collapsed morally and intellectually. The world needs a vibrant counterculture and a multitude of different visions for society. Through dialogue, debate, and competition, ideas are refined and improved and everyone benefits. In taking over the left we must keep what was working and toss out the ideas that have outlived their usefulness.

Keep 1960s left values. 1960s left values are fine and should be fully implemented. Obviously equal rights for people of color, women, and people who are LGBT are foundational. (Of course biological men should not compete in women’s sports, I should not have to explain this to anyone — it’s not a 60s value anyway). Protect the environment. Stop the war. Crack down on toxic polluters. The dreams of JFK, RFK, and MLK for a fair and just society must be completed.

Jettison postmodernism and identity politics. Foucault and postmodernism were a life preserver for millions during the era of Thatcher and Reagan when the system was so monolithic, homogenizing, and totalizing that “there is no alternative” became its motto. Foucault offered a way out, a way to be a termite to gnaw away at the pillars of state power from within.

But that era is over. Foucault and postmodernism accomplished their goal — creating space for a diversity of viewpoints especially including LGBT perspectives. Now Foucault and postmodernism have been weaponized as tools of totalitarian control and agents of Pharma/State power and must be repudiated.

Identity politics has become a dead end. The reason you are sick, depressed, and confused all the time is because Pharma is poisoning you. Come join us as we hold them accountable.

Climate change is not our biggest worry. Focusing on global warming is fine to a point, alternative energy sources are nice, but vaccine injury is going to wipe out life on earth long before rising seas ever do. And no, you don’t need $500 billion of taxpayer money to set up electric car charging stations nationwide. If the technology works as well as you say it does, great, then it should be market-competitive and capital should fund it.

VII. Focus on what matters.

Stopping Pharma Fascism is the defining issue of our lives.

The pharmaceutical industry has captured our political system, science and medicine, the media, and academia and is using these institutions to implement an incredibly profitable genocide worldwide.

The scale and mendacity of the pharmaceutical industry will soon eclipse the horrors of the Third Reich.

Pharma’s goal is to enslave the whole planet. Vaccines create chronic health conditions that leave people dependent on expensive patented pharmaceutical products in order to survive. Pharma is sucking all wealth out of every individual, every family, and the entire global economy and directing it into their own pockets.

Pharma seems to enjoy all of this — the money, the power, the control, and the sadism of inflicting harm on others. This industry wants to create a Pharma Fourth Reich in which they are the junk science high priests who will rule over everyone for a thousand years. We cannot let this happen.

To be crystal clear:

• The rise in chronic illness in children including autism, development disabilities, and childhood cancers is driven by the childhood vaccine schedule.

• Gulf War Syndrome, the rise in dementia and Alzheimer’s, and the explosion in chronic illness among adults is driven by vaccines and other toxicants.

• Covid vaccines are unsafe and ineffective and the current Covid vaccine campaigns are genocide.

In order to keep this criminal scheme going Pharma requires a vast Big Tech surveillance system, a constant fog of propaganda, and the destruction of democracy and individual liberties. This is already well underway and accelerated dramatically under the guise of the pandemic.

Our challenge is to dismantle Pharma Fascism and replace it with actual science, actual health, and respect for individual liberty. This will likely take a lifetime to accomplish. This is the work, this is what we will do, everything else is secondary.

VIII. There is no left nor right anymore, it is time we retired those worn out terms

The entire left vs. right framing of politics was always dreadful. Only 12% of the world’s population is left-handed so defining certain political ideas as “left” was to assign them to a permanent marginal status. And the entire metaphor never made sense — what do two relative directions have to do with a multitude of ideas about how best to live in harmony with each other?

Left and right are hereby retired.

The world is now divided into Pharma Fascists vs. Free and Sovereign People.

Pharma Fascists have a lot of wealth, capture, and obedient zombies under hypnosis. But that’s about all they have.

Free and Sovereign People is the descriptor for the vast majority of people on the planet. We have science, logic, reason, rationality, evidence, data, health, joy, love, families, liberty, puppies, spirit, and nature on our side.

We just have to press our advantage and drive the Pharma Fascists out of business and out of polite society forever.

I believe the way to do this will be through massive DECENTRALIZATION of all aspects of politics, economics, and knowledge.

Pharma leadership must be arrested, prosecuted, and jailed for crimes against humanity.

Those are my thoughts for now. Needless to say, I will write much more about these matters in the future, so please subscribe if you have not done so already.

Blessings to the warriors!

Prayers for everyone around the world fighting against Pharma fascism.

Huzzah to everyone working to build the better world our hearts know is possible.

Hugs for people who are just getting through the day.

In the comments, please let me know what’s on your mind.

https://tobyrogers.substack.com/p/annou ... ver-of?s=r

[Harvey]

Putting this here because of the remarks from 53:20 onward. The Soft War.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

Excellent piece. Thorough and germane to this thread.

The New Authoritarians

Woke professionals acting as the indentured servants of a fearful oligarchy have become everything we were told to fear from Trumpism


BY

ALEX GUTENTAG
MARCH 29, 2022
Tablet Magazine


After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, many Democratic voters felt baffled and betrayed. Pollsters and statisticians had predicted a decisive victory for Hillary Clinton, and her campaign had even attempted to elevate Trump because they thought he was the easiest candidate for her to beat. Conveniently, the Russian collusion narrative and allegations of white supremacy allowed the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton campaign, and the media to avoid asking themselves how they had made such an enormous miscalculation.

In reality, their inability to predict or understand Trump’s appeal to voters was symptomatic of a class stratification that had been building for decades. From the 1970s until the 2008 financial crash, only the top 20% of the country saw its real income steadily grow while the real income of the bottom 80% stagnated. This top 20% consisted largely of affluent college-educated professionals who migrated to the Democratic Party, while large segments of the working class left it. In 1960, Democratic President John F. Kennedy lost the votes of white college graduates, but he won the support of white voters without a college degree by a 2-to-1 margin. For Joe Biden, the results were the exact opposite. In 1992, almost 60% of Bill Clinton’s supporters were whites without a degree, but the same was true of only 27% of Biden voters. By 2018 the top 10 wealthiest congressional districts were all held by Democrats.

The Democratic Party’s elitism problem corresponds to a long-standing trend among liberal professionals. For decades, they have been waging a thinly veiled class war against their perceived inferiors, which Christopher Lasch described in his 1994 book Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. One of Lasch’s central arguments was that managerial elites had abandoned public debate and their basic obligations to the majority. The economic divide between the Democrat-affiliated upper-middle class and the rest of the country has produced a highly insular intelligentsia increasingly disconnected from reality and aligned with corporate interests.

While the GOP was once considered to be the party of big business, the country’s top billionaire megadonors are split between Democrats and Republicans, and Democrats equal or outpace Republicans in donations from pharmaceutical companies, the tech sector, and Wall Street. The alliance between Democrat-led causes and corporate executives is sometimes portrayed as necessary for holding off an insurrectionist, anti-democratic threat from the right. However, it is this very alliance that has produced highly centralized government and corporate control while curbing free expression and open discourse.

After Trump’s election, many commentators expressed anxiety that his followers would plunge the country into far-right authoritarianism. Instead, it is the class of college-educated Democrats that now openly argues for the value of blind submission to authority and the elimination of personal freedoms. The trend Lasch wrote about in the 1990s has metastasized. It no longer poses a mere threat to democracy—it has become a full-fledged attack on basic democratic principles. Far from upholding civil liberties, the self-proclaimed “resistance” to Trumpism has itself exhibited many hallmarks of authoritarianism: suppression of dissent, demand for unquestioning obedience, and tight control over the flow of information. While scapegoating Trump supporters, a nexus of billionaires, woke corporations, public intellectuals, and Democratic officials have sparked the very descent into authoritarianism they claimed would emerge from the populist right.

The TV production of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale premiered on April 26, 2017, and was widely touted in liberal media outlets as a “prescient” “mirror” of the country under Trump. Journalists warned that the United States was on the precipice of becoming a Gilead-like dystopia where human rights would be nonexistent. Yet based on the domineering COVID-era behavior of the show’s own target audience, The Handmaid’s Tale appears to have been less of a warning to viewers and more of a handbook. Forced and coercive medical procedures, adoption of mandatory new garbs, censorship, and frozen bank accounts were central to the totalitarian state depicted in the novel and the show. In the end, this program found its real-world parallel not in autocratic moves from the right, but in liberal-approved measures like vaccine mandates, mask requirements of dubious medical value, restrictions on speech, and seizure of protesters’ financial assets—all of which were vocally supported by the affluent laptop class.

This is not simply a matter of hypocrisy. It is only by painting themselves as victims fighting against their oppressors that college-educated professionals can rationalize their own authoritarianism. The cult of victimhood conjures the specter of fascism, misogyny, or white nationalism in order to justify blatantly repressive measures. This is why, for example, the professional class consistently portrayed unvaccinated people as Trump supporters even though in many major cities vaccine passports mostly excluded Democrat-voting Black residents from indoor establishments. Under the guise of combatting anti-vax extremism, woke liberal politicians embraced segregation and the exact kind of “systemic racism” they claimed to oppose. While considering themselves to be on the side of righteousness and rationality, commentators called for hospitals to reject unvaccinated patients, and some even celebrated their deaths. This is precisely the type of punitive, regressive tendency that progressives warned would be a consequence of Trump’s election.

It is also the inevitable outcome of a discourse that allows some of the most powerful people to depict themselves as helpless and persecuted. When The New York Times editorial board recently decried the culture of “social silencing” that has permeated most American institutions, some prominent progressives were incensed. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (whose election to Congress was powered by the most gentrified neighborhoods in her district) argued that only the left is subject to real censorship, and that concerns about cancel culture are merely “about protecting bigots from feeling embarrassed in public.” Ocasio-Cortez seemed to forget that she has explicitly advocated for censorship herself on more than one occasion. In 2019, she called on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to “take down lies,” and in 2021 she pressured Apple and Google to remove Parler, a social media service popular among conservatives, from their app stores after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t think she’s calling for real censorship because she believes that the entire political opposition is composed of violent domestic terrorists bent on killing her. (She was not in the Capitol building on Jan. 6.) It is precisely her self-image as a perpetual victim that allows her to justify a tyrannical approach.

President Biden likewise encouraged Big Tech to deplatform anyone with alternative views about COVID vaccines by presenting the people sharing these views as literal murderers who were “killing people.” Sweeping censorship that amounted to digital book burning helped create an illusion of consensus even though many of the claims prohibited on social media (such as the fact that the vaccines did not prevent transmission) proved to be true. Far from private companies exercising discretion over how their platforms are used, these tech companies operated in coordination with the executive branch, meaning their clampdown on speech was in violation of the First Amendment. This is exactly the type of orchestrated silencing effort we were once told only happens under dictatorships.

Moreover, it is not social media but mainstream news outlets that have been the largest purveyors of “misinformation.” One accusation often made against Trump supporters is that they blindly and unthinkingly believe false claims. But during the pandemic this was consistently true of college-educated Democrats, who still hold the most skewed and erroneous views about COVID. In 2022, 48% of “very liberal” people still believed that COVID posed a “great risk” to children’s health despite widely available evidence that the risk COVID poses to children is miniscule. Between January 2021 and September 2021, the CDC reported that 280 children died with COVID (later the CDC would admit that it had inflated its total death numbers by almost 25%). According to the latest available data (from 2015-19), flu and pneumonia killed more children annually. Heart disease, firearms, drowning, and motor vehicles all pose a much greater risk to children than COVID. Believing that COVID is a “great risk” for kids, justifying child mask mandates and school closures, is exactly the kind of persistent scientific illiteracy of which journalists accuse Trump supporters.

College-educated Democrats have also expressed growing support for the national security surveillance state. In response to Tucker Carlson and former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s dissenting views about the war in Ukraine, for example, the hosts of The View suggested that the Department of Justice should conduct a McCarthyite investigation comparable to the House Un-American Activities Committee. While decrying local police and virtue signaling support for Black Lives Matter, many progressives have embraced powerful agencies that have unchecked power and a history of civil and human rights violations. In 2017, 69% of Democrats said the FBI was doing a “good” or “excellent” job, compared to 49% of Republicans (and 44% of Democrats in 2003). Also in 2017, the CIA had a net favorability of 32% for Democrats, compared to a net favorability of just 4% for Republicans.

Democratic support for federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies has coincided with increasing cooperation with tech companies and media outlets. This was demonstrated by the suppression of the now “verified” 2020 Hunter Biden laptop story, which was restricted on Twitter and Facebook while the media and dozens of intelligence experts attempted to discredit it as “Russian disinformation.” The beneficiaries of a mounting culture of censorship, silence, and exclusion are not just Democrats who see some political gains. More significantly, it is their financial backers. Throughout the COVID era, the party and its affiliated voter base of white-collar workers have solidified their role as ideological enforcers for billionaires and corporations.

During lockdowns and vaccine mandates, tech and pharmaceutical companies made astronomical profits and were aided and abetted at every turn by their pajama-class foot soldiers. While lockdowns plunged millions of Americans into conditions of unemployment, despair, and hunger, it gave professionals a luxury: a time to rest at home and be free from stressors like commuting. As billionaires saw their wealth surge, the upper-middle class stayed silent or complicit. This occurred not just because many of them were eager to keep their new remote work lifestyle going for as long as possible, but also because of the “social silencing” the Times editorial board described.

This silencing had serious repercussions. It is now commonly acknowledged, for example, that school closures were a mistake, but those who spoke up early lost friends, jobs, and opportunities. What is dismissed as cancel culture is actually central to the authoritarian project. A new idea (“flatten the curve,” “save Grandma,” “two weeks to stop the spread”) can be introduced at any moment, and if it’s framed as morally necessary and unquestionable, it will receive resounding support from the most well-educated class. This poses a huge threat to society as a whole.

When new moral panics, rigid rules, and speech codes are constantly being introduced, the main function they serve is to test people’s loyalty to the dominant ideology. Anyone who has walked through a wealthy neighborhood in a coastal liberal city is likely familiar with the signs that begin “In This House We Believe …” Beyond the most surface-level beliefs of their owners, these signs point to one singularly important characteristic: the desire to conform.

But why is the professional class so concerned with virtue signaling and policing its own members? Since the 1980s, upward mobility has been declining, and college-educated millennials never economically recovered from the Great Recession. They struggled to pay off student debt, racked up high-interest loans, and experienced a “lost decade” in which few made economic progress. Home ownership has become nearly impossible, and many millennials’ finances are deeply impacted by inflation.

As a result of this increased economic pressure, the class war waged by college graduates has become two-pronged. Not only is a nexus of Democrat-affiliated academics, NGOs, and bureaucrats waging a campaign against the “unenlightened” masses, but it is also engaged in evermore competitive intra-elite battles. These battles escalated with Trump’s election, but have reached a fever pitch since the beginning of the pandemic. Thus are woke professionals of all ages advancing evermore extreme positions to oust their competitors and vie for limited spots in the managerial elite. As these positions become more extreme, the people who hold them become more absolutist, cruel, and deeply undemocratic. In other words, they become everything we were once taught to fear from Trumpism.

Alex Gutentag (@galexybrane) is a writer and Tablet columnist based in California.

#COVID-19
#WOKENESS
#DEMOCRATIC PARTY
#MEDIA

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news ... oritarians

[stickdog99]

https://thegrayzone.com/2022/03/31/left ... d-autopsy/

How the organized Left got Covid wrong, learned to love lockdowns and lost its mind: an autopsy

CHRISTIAN PARENTI·MARCH 31, 2022

It is hard to destroy your own cause and feel righteous while doing so, yet the American left has done it. After more than two centuries at the vanguard of the struggle for freedom, the American left, broadly defined, executed a volte face and embraced anti-working-class policies marketed as purely technical public health measures. For two years the left has championed policies of surveillance and exclusion in the form of: punitive vaccine mandates, invasive vaccine passports, socially destructive lockdowns, and radically unaccountable censorship by large media and technology corporations. For the entire pandemic, leftists and liberals – call them the Lockdown Left – cheered on unprecedented levels of repression aimed primarily at the working class – those who could not afford private schools and could not comfortably telecommute from second homes.

Almost the entire left intelligentsia has remained psychically stuck in March 2020. Its members have applauded the new biosecurity repression and calumniated as liars, grifters, and fascists any and all who dissented. Typically, they did so without even engaging evidence and while shirking public debate. Among the most visible in this has been Noam Chomsky, the self-described anarcho-syndicalist who called for the unvaccinated to “remove themselves from society,” and suggested that they should be allowed to go hungry if they refuse to submit. [1]

In Jacobin, a magazine claiming to support the working class in all its struggles, Branko Marcetic demanded the unvaccinated be barred from public transportation: “one obvious course of action is for Biden to make vaccines a requirement for mass transport.” [2] Journalist Doug Henwood has scolded the unvaccinated with: “Get over your own bloated sense of self-importance.” [3] [googlevideo]But Henwood has championed shutting down all of society in the name of safety, while refusing to engage counter-arguments[/googlevideo] – a combination that suggests a bloated sense of self-importance of his own.

Other left intellectuals, like Benjamin Bratton, author of a Verso book on the pandemic called Return of the Real, are notable for hiding amidst academic blather: “the book’s argument is on behalf [of] a ‘positive biopolitics’ that may form the basis of viable social self-organization, but this is less a statement on behalf of ‘the political’ in some metaphysical sense than on behalf of a governmentality through which an inevitably planetary society can deliberately compose itself.” [4] This is, as the late Alex Cockburn once said, “what dumb people think smart people sound like.”

Even the American Civil Liberties Union – long a bastion of objective thinking and civil liberties absolutism – has supported the mandates, lockdowns, and censorship. David Cole, the group’s legal director, debased himself in the New York Times with a tortured op-ed explaining how everything the ACLU stood for over the last 100 years suddenly did not apply during the season of freakout and overreach.5

When activist left influencers did stray from the official line, it was to occasionally harumph about how school closure would be ok if we just had “free childcare for all.” That argument is so flimsy one wants to respond with: “Yes, and let’s call these new socialist childcare centers: public schools!”

All of this unmasks the Lockdown Left’s blue-city provincialism. Its adherents drink high-quality coffee and enjoy bike lanes, but have revealed themselves to be as narrow-minded, clannish, mean-spirited and faith-based as any group of small-town “deplorables” might be. If you don’t agree with the consensus in Cambridge, Brooklyn, Bethesda, or Berkeley, then you are very obviously insane. End of story. For this set, Covid vaccines have become a fetish, a talisman to wave against the specter of “contagion”; while lockdowns and censorship are treated as purely technical, apolitical interventions. Prominent left intellectuals have embraced the weaponization of solidarity and made it into a lifestyle via their obsessive masking, scolding, and hiding. They pretend to care for society while actually applauding deeply anti-social and scientifically ungrounded policies like the indefinite shuttering of schools.

All of this is contingent upon the status of Lockdown Leftists as relatively privileged laptop workers who can operate from the comfort of home, dependent on anonymous “frontline workers” ferrying food and Amazon packages to their doorstep. Prior to the pandemic quarantines, many left intellectuals already lived as if they were on lockdown. I know this because I am part of that class.

Never mind that we are in the tightest labor market in 40 years and should be encouraging workers to unite and fight the bosses for better conditions. Instead, most of the left – including some trade unions – has supported measures that divide, distract, and intimidate the working class. It is a tragic and disturbing spectacle.

The socialist left, which wants to use state power to discipline capital has instead accepted the negative image of its goal: state power used to bully, harass, and discipline workers. The left’s embrace of Covid hysteria makes a mockery of the left’s goals of planning, industrial policy, economic redistribution, worker empowerment, and environmental sustainability. This leftwing self-harm will have deleterious consequences for years to come. Indeed, the situation is worse than a mere political fumble. The left is now actively helping its own enemies. In its unwavering support for mandates, passports, punitive lockdowns, and censorship, the organized left has sided with technocratic elites, the one percent, and the repressive state apparatus everywhere.

Even as politicians climb down from two years of pandemic overreach, the left continues to demand more covid repression and does nothing to oppose punitive vaccine mandates that have driven many thousands of workers out of their jobs – almost 3,000 public workers in NYC alone. For example, my union – the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) representing faculty and staff at the City University of New York (CUNY) and run by a self-consciously “left” clique – continues to demand that all CUNY workers submit to vaccination even as the administration had long ago settled into a workable “vax or test” system.

Worse yet, the PSC seems not to realize that its crusade may invite lawsuits that could fatally undermine the ironclad protections of academic tenure. If the union were to prevail against dissident members in court, their victory would, in effect, reduce tenure to merely another form of routinely breakable contract. University administrators across the country, eager to degrade and casualize academic labor, know this and will be watching with anticipation.

At John Jay College, where I work, the PSC demands vaccination policies – take the jab or be fired – even as a staggering 44% of the non-teaching staff remained unvaccinated as of late February 2022.6 And the union remains obtusely fixated on vaccines despite the fact that not even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) maintains that vaccines stop or reduce Covid transmission. Director Rochelle Walensky volunteered this fact during an August 5, 2021 interview with Wolf Blitzer. [7] These days, the Lockdown Left still clings to the vaccine myth.

Covid repression portrays itself as apolitical and purely “scientific.” Sadly, most leftists accept this canard. But class war from above is always masked as “merely technical.” Proponents of the War on Drugs never described their open-ended campaign of domestic repression and surveillance as a war on workers and the poor. Likewise, proponents of the War on Terror never described their campaign of forever wars as a permanent assault on the Global South and a war to maintain American hegemony. The left saw through those concoctions. We opposed drug testing not because we were in favor of sharing the road with stoned truck drivers, but rather because we saw the political utility and inherent value in workers having autonomy from coercion by bosses. Alas, the War on Covid, has (at least temporarily) erased our side’s analytic capacities. For large parts of the left it is still March 2020.

Arguing reason against Covid hysteria is like attempting to put out a magnesium fire using water. But I will try anyway.

Theory of the crime

Here is my theory of the crime: a reckless smash and grab operation by Big Pharma, assisted by our totally captured public health agencies, has been allowed to run unchecked, like a cytokine storm of bad policy, because of the unique political dynamics of the 2020 presidential election in which mass Trump Derangement Syndrome short-circuited the critical faculties of almost the entire journalistic class and Democratic Party ecosystem, including the so-called movement left – that milieu of nonprofits, trade unions, pressure groups, and alternative media personalities.

many more valuable pages with voluminous footnotes

[Elvis]

Announcing a hostile takeover of the left

This is a bizarre and confused analysis, and not just its exclusionary focus on "Pharma Fascism" but the strangely contradictory prescriptions for its "hostile takeover" of the left. Hostile takeover of the left is exactly what it says it is, the "in the corporate sector" model couldn't be more apt.

The Hostile Takeover of the Left announces that "the movement will be rebranded and relaunched with a focus on the issues that matter." But aside from their solitary emphasis on Pharma Fascism, they never talk about the issues that matter. In the "wheat from the chaff' section, the most verbage goes to "identity politics"; a very odd priority. There is no mention of the central, persistent problem of mass unemployment; nothing about the financial industry's iron grip on US healthcare access; not a word about the crisis in education and crippling student debt; a passing mention of the environment—but note that climate change is dimissed, in the oddest way: the Hostile Takeover of the Left says that "alternative energy sources are nice" but "it should be market-competitive and capital should fund it." Isn't that curious, for a person claiming 'leftist space."

Yet, "nationalize Pharma." (I agree... except, how do you nationalize foreign companies?)


And of course we get the old, tired, wrong, rightwing "taxpayer money" framing:

you don’t need $500 billion of taxpayer money to set up electric car charging stations nationwide.

This alone disqualifies this writer as any 21st century exponent of the left. Pack up your stuff and get out. We don’t ever want to hear from you again.


I should have stopped reading when Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein are "actual Nazis." Holy Fuck. How can any of this be taken seriously?


Innovative policy initiative here:

The billionaires. Behind every great fortune is a great crime. Nobody likes you. Go away.

That's telling 'em! Love-starved billionaires will soon be begging for our affection.


This is my favorite paragraph:

Keep 1960s left values. 1960s left values are fine and should be fully implemented. Obviously equal rights for people of color, women, and people who are LGBT are foundational. (Of course biological men should not compete in women’s sports, I should not have to explain this to anyone — it’s not a 60s value anyway). Protect the environment. Stop the war. Crack down on toxic polluters. The dreams of JFK, RFK, and MLK for a fair and just society must be completed.

But of course,

it should be market-competitive and capital should fund it.

I still can't get past that bit.

The dreams of JFK, RFK, and MLK (where's FDR?) were national healthcare and a national job guarantee. Why isn't this blogger advocating those dreams? It looks like dropping the initials JFK, RFK, and MLK is a nod to the left, but you know if those men were alive today, the OP blogger would be savaging them right along with Chomsky and Klein.


And about this...

suspend trade relations with China

Does the blogger have any idea what that would mean? Does he say this because of "the China virus"?


This guy is claiming his place in "leftist space" but from this blog post, I don't see where "left" really even comes into the picture. His single-minded antivax politics cast him as neither left nor right, just someone who's convinced that big pharm is trying to enslave the world (and why wouldn't they?) and thinks infrastructure should be market-competitive and capital should fund it.

There's more, but I'll end here.

I just Googled Toby Rogers—he has a Ph.D. in political economy from the University of Sydney in Australia and "was a researcher for former U.S. Labor Secretary, Robert Reich"!