C.J. Hopkins's Blog, page 15

The War on White Supremacist Terror

If you enjoyed the global corporatocracy’s original War on Islamicist Terror, you’re going to love their latest spinoff, The War on White Supremacist Terror. It’s basically just like the old War on Terror, except that this time the bad guys are all white supremacists, and Donald Trump is Osama bin Laden … unless Putin is Osama bin Laden. OK, I’m not quite sure who’s Osama bin Laden. Whatever. The point is, the Terrorists are coming!

Yes, that’s right, some racist psycho murdered a bunch of people in Texas, so it’s time to “take the gloves off” again, pass some new kind of Patriot Act, further curtail our civil liberties, and generally whip the public up into a mass hysteria over “white supremacist terrorism.”

The New York Times Editorial Board is already hard at work on that front. In a lengthy op-ed that ran last Sunday, “We Have a White Nationalist Terrorist Problem,” the Board proposes that we would all be safer if the government — but presumably not the current government — could arbitrarily deem people “terrorists,” or “potential terrorists,” or “terrorist sympathizers,” regardless of whether they have any connection to any actual terrorist groups, and … well, here’s what the Editorial Board has in mind.

“The resources of the American government and its international allies would mobilize without delay. The awesome power of the state would work tirelessly to deny future terrorists access to weaponry, money and forums to spread their ideology. The movement would be infiltrated by spies and informants. Its financiers would face sanctions. Places of congregation would be surveilled. Those who gave aid or comfort to terrorists would be prosecuted.”

The Board didn’t mention the offshore gulags, wars of aggression, assassinations, torture, mass surveillance of virtually everyone, and other such features of the original War on Terror, but presumably all that kind of stuff would be included in “the awesome power of the state” that the Board would like the U.S. government to “mobilize without delay.”

And the mandarins of The New York Times were just getting started with the terrorism hysteria. The Tuesday edition was brimming with references to “white supremacy” and “domestic terrorism.” Here are some of the front page headlines … “Trump is a White Supremacist Who Inspires Terrorism.” “White Terrorism Shows Parallels to Islamic State.” “The Nihilist in Chief: how our president and our mass shooters are connected to the same dark psychic forces.” “I Spent 25 Years Fighting Jihadis. White Supremacists Aren’t So Different.” “Trump, Tax Cuts, and Terrorism.“ And so on.

The Times was hardly alone, of course. In the wake of the El Paso and Dayton shootings, the corporate media went into overdrive, pumping out “white supremacist terrorism” mass hysteria around the clock. The Guardian took a break from smearing Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite to proclaim that El Paso was “Trump-inspired Terrorism.” The Sydney Morning Herald declared that the U.S. is now officially in the throes of a “white nationalist terrorism crisis.“ The Atlantic likened Trump to Anwar al-Awlaki, and assured us that “the worst is yet to come!“ Liberal journalists and politicians rushed onto Twitter to inform their followers that a global conspiracy of white supremacist terrorists “emboldened” or “inspired” by Donald Trump (who, remember, is a Russian secret agent) is threatening the very fabric of democracy, so it’s time to take some extraordinary measures!

Never mind that it turns out that two of the three “white supremacist terrorist” mass murderers in question (i.e., the Gilroy, El Paso, and Dayton shooters) do not appear to have been white supremacists, and that none of them were linked to any terrorist groups. We’re living in the Age of Non-Terrorist Terrorism, in which anyone can be deemed a “terrorist,” or a “suddenly self-radicalized terrorist,” regardless of whether they have any actual connection to organized terrorism.

Terrorism isn’t what used to be. Back in the day (i.e, the 1970s), there were terrorist groups like the PFLP, ANO, BSO, IRA, RAF, FARC, the Weather Underground, and so on … in other words, actual terrorist groups, committing acts of actual terrorism. More recently, there was al Qaeda and ISIS. Nowadays, however, more or less any attention-seeking sociopath with a death wish and a knock-off AR-15 (or moron with a bunch of non-exploding pipe bombs) can be deemed a bona fide “domestic terrorist,” as long as it serves the global capitalist ruling classes’ official narrative.

The official narrative of the moment is Democracy versus The Putin-Nazis (also known as The War on Populism), which I’ve been covering in these columns, satirically and more seriously, for the better part of the last three years. According to this official narrative, “democracy is under attack” by a conspiracy of Russians and neo-Nazis that magically materialized out of thin air during the Summer of 2016, right around the time Trump won the nomination. OK, the Russia part kind of sputtered out recently, so the global capitalist ruling classes and their mouthpieces in the corporate media are now going full-bore on the fascism hysteria. They’ve been doing this relentlessly since Trump won the election, alternating between the Russia hysteria and the fascism hysteria from week to week, day to day, sometimes hour to hour, depending on which one is “hot” at the moment.

These recent mass shootings have provided them with a golden opportunity, not just to flog the fascism hysteria once again, but to fold it into the terrorism hysteria which Americans have been indoctrinated with since September 11, 2001 (the objective of which indoctrination being to establish in the American psyche “the Terrorist” as the new official enemy, replacing the “Communist” official enemy that had filled this role throughout the Cold War). If you think the original War on Terror was just about oil or geopolitical hegemony, check out “leftist” political Twitter’s response to the El Paso and Dayton shootings. You’ll find, not just hysterical liberals, but “leftists” and even so-called “anarchists,” shrieking about “white supremacist terrorism.” It was the number one U.S. hashtag on Monday.

No, the original War on Terror (whatever else it was) was probably the most effective fascist psy-op in the history of fascist psy-ops. Fifteen years of relentless exposure to manufactured “terrorism” hysteria has conditioned most Americans (and most Westerners, generally), upon hearing emotional trigger words like “terrorist” and “terrorism” emanating from the mouths of politicians (or the front page of The New York Times) to immediately switch off their critical thinking, and start demanding that the authorities censor the Internet, suspend the U.S. Constitution, and fill the streets with militarized vehicles and special “anti-terror” forces with assault rifles in the “sling-ready” position. This tweet by Geraldo Rivera captures the authoritarian mindset perfectly:

“In the meantime, there must be active-shooter trained, heavily armed security personnel every place innocents are gathered.”

I’m not quite sure what “in the meantime” means. Perhaps it means until the USA, Western Europe, and the rest of the empire, can be transformed into a happy, hate-free, supranational corporate police state where there is no racism, no fascism, no terrorism, and no one ever says bad things on the Internet.

What a glorious, transhuman world that will be, like a living, breathing Benetton ad, once all the racists, terrorists, and extremists have been eliminated, or heavily medicated, or quarantined and reeducated!

Until then, the War on White Supremacist Terrorism, Domestic Terrorism, Islamicist Terrorism, Russian Terrorism, Iranian Terrorism, anti-Semitic Labour Party Terrorism, and any other type of terrorism, extremism, hate, conspiratorial thinking … oh, and Populism (I almost forgot that one), and every other type of non-conformity to global capitalist ideology, will continue until we achieve final victory! It’s coming … sooner than you probably think.

Damn, here I am, at the end of my essay, and I almost forget to call Trump a racist. He is, of course. He’s a big fat racist. I should have put that right at the top. I’m already in hot water with my fellow leftists for not doing that enough. Oh, and for the record, in case there are any other kinds of Inquisitors reading this, I also renounce Satan and all his works.

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CJ Hopkins
August 8, 2019
Photo: Walmart CCTV

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DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Patreon page (where you can contribute as little $1 per month), or send your contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our staff up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian novel, Zone 23, which we understand is pretty gosh darn funny, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, please feel free to contact him directly.

The United States of Fascism Hysteria

So it’s been an exciting few weeks for Antifa and the rest of the neoliberal Resistance. OK, they haven’t yet managed to overthrow the Putin-Nazi occupation government (hereinafter “POG”), but they’ve definitely got “the Fash” on the run. “Fascism” hysteria is spreading like wildfire. Liberal Twitter mobs are out for blood. At this point, it’s only a matter of time until the sleeping giant of normality awakens and purges America of the fascist filth that have Putin-Nazified this once great nation.

Antifa has been at the vanguard of the fight, smashing the Fash on both East and West Coasts. In Portland, where a gang of neo-fascist anti-masturbationists known as the “Proud Boys” had assembled for a self-promotional street fight they were billing as the “Battle of Portland 2,” Antifa militants positively identified and preventatively beat the living snot out of a journalist named Andy Ngo. To prevent him from snitching to the fascist cops (who are allegedly working hand in hand with POG), they self-defensively robbed him, sprayed him with silly string, and pelted him with vegan milkshakes.

Now, before you get all up in arms about Antifa assaulting and robbing journalists, you need to know a couple of things. First, according to Antifa spokespersons, and those bloodthirsty liberal Twitter mobs, Andy Ngo is a “fascist adjacent,” and possibly even a card carrying fascist. Antifa representative Alexander Reid Ross claims that Ngo is personally responsible for putting people’s names on a Nazi “kill-list” (or at least that Ngo’s writing has been published by Quillette, which published an article by someone else that some fascists read and copied people’s names from), so, basically, he deserves to die.

Also, assaulting and robbing Ngo was technically “preemptive self-defense” (you know, the same as when we invaded Iraq to defend ourselves from those WMDs). Despite their helmets and body armor, and the fact that Ngo is a doughy little gay guy, his presence among them on a public street was making Antifa feel “unsafe.” So, they had no choice but to beat him senseless, steal his camera, and vegan milkshake him. As Antifa expert Mark Bray explains, when you’re Antifa, “fighting back is always self-defense, even if [you] strike the first blow.” (This logic only applies to anti-fascists, of course, like Antifa and the U.S. military, and not to, you know, gangs of thugs, or the perpetrators of wars of aggression.)

Antifa’s self-defensive mugging of a journalist apparently scared the crap out of POG, because one week later, back in Washington, D.C., President Hitler called in the tanks, and the Luftwaffe, and announced that he was going to stage a reenactment of a Nuremberg Rally right in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The liberal intelligentsia went apeshit. This was really it this time! Putin had given Trump the green-light to declare martial law and pronounce himself Führer. The long-awaited Putin-Nazi Apocalypse was finally about to begin!

Unfortunately, Trump’s Fourth of July Jamboree turned out to be a rather tame affair. He even almost made it through his speech without making an ass of himself. This was extremely disappointing for liberals, who were hoping he would go full-Hitler, paint “death’s heads” on the turrets of the Bradleys and a Swastika on the tail of Air Force One, and order ICE to start rounding up the Jews.

The weekend wasn’t a total let-down, however. The Proud Boys (who are clearly gluttons for punishment), staged another self-promotional event, this one billed as “Defend Free Speech.” A few hundred people turned up to listen to speeches by a handful of alt-right clowns desperately trying to reignite their careers. They were outnumbered 2 to 1 by Antifa, Black Lives Matter, assorted drag queens, and an indigenous, two-spirited transperson of color, who reportedly “performed a spoken word” on the meaning of the term “latinx.”

The D.C. police (who are even more fascist than the Portland police who stood by and watched as Antifa beat up and robbed a journalist) fascistically prevented Antifa militants from storming into the Alt-right rally and beating the snot out of everyone in sight. So, the anti-fascists had no choice but to preemptively attack a newspaper dispenser, which was presumably making them feel “unsafe,” or disseminating POG propaganda, or something. One of them tried to burn a flag, but he couldn’t figure out how to operate his matches. Assorted other hilarious acts of revolutionary direct action followed. Apparently, Antifa’s strategy was to smash the Fash by amusing them to death.

Meanwhile, militant Resistance actions against the POG “concentration camps” continue. New York City, San Francisco, and other liberal metropolitan areas have almost completely emptied out as liberals flock to the southern border to liberate the surviving prisoners. Conditions in the camps are now beyond inhuman. According to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, migrants are being forced to drink out of toilets, and otherwise subjected to “systematic cruelty,” (so you can understand why liberals are physically putting their bodies on the line to bring an end to this horrifying sadism, and not just sitting around on the Internet shrieking about “concentration camps” as they travel to their summer holiday rentals on Martha’s Vineyard, or the Hamptons, or wherever).

No, these Putin-Nazi “concentration camps” are nothing at all like the “detention facilities” the Obama administration operated, even though they look exactly the same. Sure, thousands of migrant children were separated from their parents, in cages, and there were tens of thousands of incidents of rape, sexual abuse, beatings, and so on, but, otherwise, these Obama “detention facilities” were more like great big 2-star hotels, or like student dorms at a state university, so there was no need for liberals to get all worked up and start comparing them to places like Dachau and Buchenwald.

Plus, here’s a picture of dead people! Look at this picture! These people are dead! So just shut up about Obama already! Enough with history, and critical thinking, and the practical aspects of immigration policy! It’s time to abolish all national borders, issue everyone a U.S. passport, and transcend the whole concept of national sovereignty … or at least to provide the capitalist ruling classes with an endless supply of cheap, undocumented, extremely compliant unskilled labor. Those Bel Air lawns aren’t going to mow themselves!

Jesus, I can’t believe I just wrote that. Concentration camps and dead people are nothing to joke about. It’s OK, however, to cynically use them to whip people up into a paroxysm of manufactured mass fascism hysteria. Not that the neoliberal ruling classes and the corporate media would ever do that. No, they would never repeatedly attempt to evoke our hatred of the actual Nazis (and their actual concentration camps … which people were dragged out of their homes, loaded onto trains, and shipped away to, and which you could not voluntarily depart) in order to short circuit our critical thinking, or otherwise emotionally manipulate us into supporting their War on Populism.

No, the Putin-Nazi occupation government is not just manufactured mass hysteria concocted by the neoliberal ruling classes. Donald Trump is really a Nazi. There’s a portrait of Hitler in the Oval Office. Putin really controls America. Putin, and his cabal of Russian Nazis. They’re everywhere. They own the banks. They control the media. They control elections. They are the “International Invisible Government.” (Is any of this sounding vaguely familiar?) They are devising the Final Solution to the Immigrant Problem right this minute. They are doing this at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump has had a big “Black Sun” etched into the marble floor.

So, if you’re serious about your anti-fascism, now’s the time to load up on silly string, ski goggles, masks, hard knuckle gloves, and whatever you make those milkshakes with. POG might be on the run at the moment, but there’s an election season coming up, so we need to be prepared for anything. The important thing is to remain hysterical, and to be ready to respond to whatever emotional stimuli the ruling classes wave in our faces. The fate of democracy hangs in the balance.

Oh, and watch out for those fascist newspaper dispensers!

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CJ Hopkins
July 10, 2019
Photo: “Antifa” by cantfightthetendies – CC BY 2.0

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DISCLAIMER:
The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and
self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the
views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its staff, or any of
its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Patreon page (where you can contribute as little $1 per month), or send your contribution to his PayPal account,
so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our
staff up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical
dystopian novel, Zone 23, which we understand is pretty gosh darn funny, or any of his subversive stage plays,
which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not
appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive
email, please feel free to contact him directly.

The Ongoing Restructuring of the Greater Middle East

So, according to the corporate media, and to President Literally Hitler, himself, while America was sleeping last Friday morning, the U.S. Air Force was just minutes away from bombing the bejesus out of some desolate outposts somewhere in the Iranian desert and launching another catastrophic military blunder in the Middle East.

At approximately 0400 Zulu time, President Hitler and his top advisors (among them, John “the Walrus of Death” Bolton) were gathered in the Pentagon’s War Room, flight paths arcing across the big board. The hotline to Vladimir Putin’s office in St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow had been activated. The full force of the U.S. military was about to be brought to bear upon a package of top-level Iranian targets with no strategic value whatsoever. Apparently, “planes were in the air!” It was all so terribly, terribly exciting.

This awesome demonstration of American resolve was meant to be punishment for the vicious slaughter of an expensive U.S. military drone, which was peacefully invading Iranian airspace, and not at all attempting to provoke the Iranians into blowing it out of the sky with a missile so the U.S. military could “retaliate.” The military-industrial complex would never dream of doing anything like that, not even to further the destabilization and restructuring of the Greater Middle East that they’ve been systematically carrying out the since the collapse of the former Soviet Union, which … more on that in just a moment.

Nor did the incursion into Iranian airspace of this non-provacative military drone have anything whatsoever to do with the crippling economic sanctions the U.S.A. has imposed on Iran in order to completely destroy its economy and foment a coup against its leaders, who are allegedly conspiring with Hezbollah and al Qaeda to develop an arsenal of nuclear weapons to launch at Israel and Saudi Arabia, and other peaceful Middle Eastern democracies, and who were possibly responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and, who knows, maybe even the Holocaust!

Iran, remember, is a “terrorist nation,” which is not playing ball with the “international community,” which is why NATO has it completely surrounded and is flying hundred million dollar military drones up and down its coastline. Also, they don’t like homosexuals (i.e., the Iranians, not NATO, of course), and they burn big American flags on television, and are generally Hitlerian in every other way. On top of which, they’re allies of Russia, the fount of all democracy-hating, fascist evil in the world today.

Which, I don’t know, makes it kind of weird that President Hitler would want to attack them, and destroy their economy with those crippling sanctions. I mean, why would Putin allow him to do that? What was the point of brainwashing all those African Americans with those Facebook ads if his Manchurian President Hitler Puppet was just going to let The Walrus of Death and his deep state cronies bomb his allies? Honestly, the more I watch of this movie, the less the plot makes sense to me … but, hey, I’m just a political satirist, and not a professional Putin-Naziologist, or a geopolitical analyst, or whatever.

If I were (i.e., a geopolitical analyst), I guess I might want to take a step back and try to frame last week’s events within a broader historical context, rather than getting all worked up by the manufactured mass hysteria of the moment. If I did that, things might look a bit clearer, albeit somewhat less terribly exciting.

For example, that destabilization and restructuring of the Greater Middle East I just mentioned above, which has been in progress since the early 1990s, regardless of who was sleeping in the White House. The Gulf War, the Iraq War, the “Arab Spring,” Egypt, Libya, Syria, et cetera … if I were a geopolitical analyst, I might be able to discern a pattern there, and possibly even some sort of strategy.

If I were a particularly cynical analyst, it might look to me like global capitalism, starting right around 1990, freed by the collapse of the U.S.S.R. to do whatever the hell it wanted, more or less immediately started dismantling uncooperative power structures throughout the Greater Middle East. My cynical theory would kind of make sense of the “catastrophic policy blunders” that the United States has supposedly made in Iraq, Libya, and throughout the region, not to mention the whole “Global War on Terror,” and what it is currently doing to Syria, and Iran.

Take a good look at this Smithsonian map of where the U.S.A. is “combating terrorism.” Note how the U.S. military (i.e., global capitalism’s unofficial “enforcer”) has catastrophically blundered its way into more or less every nation depicted. Or ask our “allies” in Saudi Arabia, Israel, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and so on. OK, you might have to reach them in New York or London, or in the South of France this time of year, but, go ahead, ask them about the horrors they’ve been suffering on account of our “catastrophic blunders.”

See, according to this crackpot conspiracy theory that I would put forth if I were a geopolitical analyst instead of just a political satirist, there have been no “catastrophic policy blunders,” not for global capitalism. The Restructuring of the Greater Middle East is proceeding exactly according to plan. The regional ruling classes are playing ball, and those who wouldn’t have been regime-changed, or are being regime-changed, or are scheduled for regime change.

Sure, for the actual people of the region, and for regular Americans, the last thirty years of wars, “strategic” bombings, sanctions, fomented coups, and other such shenanigans have been a pointless waste of lives and money … but global capitalism doesn’t care about people or the “sovereign nations” they believe they live in, except to the extent they are useful. Global capitalism has no nations. All it has are market territories, which are either open for business or not.

Take a look at that map again. What you’re looking at is global capitalism cleaning up after winning the Cold War. And yes, I do mean global capitalism, not the United States of America (i.e., the “nation” most Americans think they live in, despite all evidence to the contrary). I know it hurts to accept the fact that “America” is nothing but a simulation projected onto an enormous marketplace … but seriously, do you honestly believe that the U.S. government and its military serve the interests of the American people? If so, go ahead, review the history of their activities since the Second World War, and explain to me how they have benefited Americans … not the corporatist ruling classes, regular working class Americans, many of whom can’t afford to see a doctor, or buy a house, or educate their kids, not without assuming a lifetime of debt to some global financial institution.

OK, so I digressed a little. The point is, “America” is not at war with Iran. Global capitalism is at war with Iran. The supranational corporatist empire. Yes, it wears an American face, and waves a big American flag, but it is no more “American” than the corporations it comprises, or the governments those corporations own, or the military forces those governments control, or the transnational banks that keep the whole show running.

This
is what Iran and Syria are up against. This is what Russia is up
against. Global capitalism doesn’t want to nuke them, or occupy them.
It wants to privatize them, like it is privatizing the rest of the
world, like it has already privatized America … according to my
crackpot theory, of course.

But, again, I’m just a political satirist, not a geopolitical analyst. What the hell do I know about anything? Probably, if we just impeach Donald Trump, or The Walrus of Death, or elect Joe Biden, or Bernie Sanders, or some other individual, we can put an end to all these catastrophic blunders that America keeps making in the Middle East.

So forget about my crackpot conspiracy theories, and let’s get back to whatever terribly exciting crisis is unfolding today. Seriously, my brain kind of hurts. I can’t wait to switch on the Internet and find out who’s threatening America at the moment … Russians, Iranians, Venezuelans, anti-Semites, Mexican migrants, Nazis? The possibilities are endless.

Ready? OK, here we go.

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CJ Hopkins
June 25, 2019
Photo: FOX News

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DISCLAIMER:
The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and
self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the
views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its staff, or any of
its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Patreon page (where you can contribute as little $1 per month), or send your contribution to his PayPal account,
so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our
staff up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical
dystopian novel, Zone 23, which we understand is pretty gosh darn funny, or any of his subversive stage plays,
which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not
appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive
email, please feel free to contact him directly.

The Hitlerization of Jeremy Corbyn (Among Others)

Every time you think the corporatocracy’s manufactured anti-Semitism hysteria cannot possibly get more absurd, they somehow manage to outdo themselves. OK, stay with me now, because this is a weird one.

Apparently, American Hitler and his cronies are conspiring with some secret group of “Jewish leaders” to stop British Hitler from becoming prime minister and wiping out all the Jews in Great Britain. Weird, right? But that’s not the weird part, because maybe American Hitler wants to wipe out all the Jews in Great Britain himself, rather than leaving it to British Hitler … Hitlers being notoriously jealous regarding their genocidal accomplishments.

No, the weird part is that everyone knows that American Hitler does not make a move without the approval of Russian Hitler, who is also obsessed with wiping out the Jews, and with destroying the fabric of Western democracy. So why would Russian Hitler want to let American Hitler and his goons thwart the ascendancy of British Hitler, who, in addition to wanting to wipe out all the Jews, also wants to destroy democracy by fascistically refunding the NHS, renationalizing the rail system, and so on?

It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, does it? In any event, here’s the official story.

In “a recording leaked to The Washington Post,” and then flogged by the rest of the corporate media, Reichsminister des Auswärtigen, Mike Pompeo, told a group of unnamed “Jewish leaders” that American Hitler (i.e., Donald Trump) will “push back” (i.e., intervene) against British Hitler (i.e., Jeremy Corbyn) to protect the lives of Jews in Great Britain if British Hitler becomes prime minister (and is possibly already doing so now). The identities of these “Jewish leaders” have not been disclosed by the corporate media, presumably in order to protect them from being murdered by Corbyn’s Nazi hit squad. Whoever they were, they wanted to know whether American Hitler and his fascist cabinet were “willing to work with [them] to take on actions if life becomes very difficult for Jews” after Jeremy Corbyn seizes power, declares himself Führer of Communist Britannia, and orders the immediate invasion of France.

To anyone who has been closely following the corporate media’s relentless coverage of Jeremy Corbyn’s Nazi Death Cult (i.e., the UK Labour Party) and the global Anti-Semitism Pandemic, it comes as no real surprise that this group of “Jewish leaders” (whoever they are) would want to stop him from becoming prime minister. I doubt that their motives have much to do with fighting anti-Semitism, or anything else specifically “Jewish,” but … well, I’m kind of old-fashioned that way. I still believe there’s a fundamental difference between “the Jews” and the global capitalist ruling classes.

I realize that both the neoliberal establishment and the neo-fascist fringe disagree with me, and that both are determined (for different reasons) to conflate the two in the public’s mind, but that’s my take, and I’m sticking to it. I don’t think the world is controlled by “the Jews.” I think it’s controlled by global capitalism.

Go ahead, call me a conspiracy theorist. Here’s how the anti-Semitism panic in the United Kingdom looks to me.

After nearly 40 years of privatization and restructuring, British society is on the brink of being permanently transformed into the type of savage, neo-feudal, corporatist nightmare that the USA already is. The global capitalist ruling classes are extremely pleased about this state of affairs. They would now like to finish up privatizing Britain, so they can get on with privatizing the rest of Europe. The last thing they need at this critical juncture is Jeremy Corbyn to become prime minister and start attempting to remake their nascent neoliberal marketplace into a society … you know, where healthcare is guaranteed to all, you don’t need a mortgage to buy a train ticket, and people don’t have to eat out of trash bins.

Unlike in the USA, where there is no functional political Left, and where the non-parliamentary “two-party system” is almost totally controlled by the corporatocracy, in the UK, there are still a few old-fashioned socialists, and they have taken back the Labour Party from the neoliberal Blairite stooges that had been managing the transformation of Britain into the aforementioned neo-feudal nightmare. Jeremy Corbyn is the leader of these socialists. So the corporatocracy needs to destroy him, take back control of the Labour Party, and turn it back into a fake left party, like the Democratic Party in the USA, so they can concentrate on crushing the right-wing populists. Thus, they need to Hitlerize Corbyn, so they can fold him into their official narrative, Democracy vs. The Putin-Nazis.

And, see, this is what makes the corporatocracy’s War
on Populism so seemingly psychotic … at least to anyone paying
attention.

In the USA, the populist insurgency is primarily a right-wing phenomenon (because, again, there is no Left to speak of). Thus, the neoliberal ruling classes are focused on Hitlerizing Donald Trump, and stigmatizing the millions of Americans who voted for him as a bunch of Nazis. Hitlerizing Trump has been ridiculously easy (he almost Hitlerizes himself), but the ultimate goal is to delegitimize the populist sentiment that put him into office. That sentiment is primarily neo-nationalist. So it’s a one-front counter-insurgency op (i.e., neoliberalism versus neo-nationalism).

In the UK, things are not that simple. There, the neoliberal ruling classes are waging a counter-insurgency op against populist forces on two major fronts: (1) the Brexiters (i.e., nationalism); and (2) the Corbynists (i.e., socialism). They’re getting hit from both the left and right, which is screwing up the official narrative (according to which the “enemies of democracy” are supposed to be right-wing neo-nationalists). So, as contradictory and absurd as it sounds, they needed to conflate both left and right populism into one big scary Hitlerian enemy. Thus, they needed to Hitlerize Corbyn. Presto … Labour Anti-Semitism crisis!

Now, anyone who is isn’t a gibbering idiot knows that Jeremy Corbyn is not an anti-Semite and the Labour Party is not a hive of Nazis. It’s a testament to the power of the corporate media that such a statement even needs to be made … but, of course, that’s the point of the smear campaign the neoliberal corporate media have been waging for the last three years.

Smear campaigns are simple and effective. The goal is to force your
target and his allies into proclaiming things like, “I am not an
anti-Semite,” or “I’ve never had sex with underage boys,”
or whatever smear you want to force them to deny. You don’t have to
prove your target guilty. You’re just trying to conjure up a
“reality” in which every time someone thinks of your target
they associate him with the content of your smears.

The corporate media have done just that, to Jeremy Corbyn, to Donald Trump, to Putin, and to assorted lesser figures. They did it to Sanders in 2016. They are doing it now to Tulsi Gabbard. The goal is not only to smear these targets, but also, and more so, to conjure a “world” that reifies the narrative of their smears … a binary “good versus evil” world, a world in which whatever they want to accuse their targets of being linked to (e.g., terrorism, fascism, racism, or whatever) is the official enemy of all that is good.

Since the Brexit referendum and the election of Trump, the ruling classes have conjured up a world where “democracy” is perpetually under attack by a global conspiracy of “Russians” and “Nazis” (just as they previously conjured up a world where it was perpetually under attack by “terrorists”). They have conjured up a post-Orwellian reality in which “democracy” (i.e., global capitalism) is the only alternative to “neo-fascism” (i.e., anything opposed to global capitalism).

And this is why Corbyn had to be Hitlerized, and why Putin, Trump, Assad, Gabbard, Assange, the “Yellow Vest” protesters in France, and anyone else opposing global neoliberalism has to be Hitlerized. Socialism, nationalism … it makes no difference, not to the global capitalist ruling classes. There are always only two sides in these “worlds” that the ruling classes conjure up for us, and there can be only one official enemy. The official enemy of the moment is “fascism.” Therefore, all the “bad guys” are Hitler, or Nazis, or racists, or anti-Semites, or some other variation of Hitler.

The fact that this “reality” they have conjured up for us is completely psychotic makes it no less real. And it is only going to get more insane until the corporatocracy restores “normality.” So, go ahead, if you consider yourself “normal,” and try to force your mind to believe that Jews are no longer safe in Great Britain, or in Germany, or France, or the USA, and that Donald Trump is a Russian asset, and is also literally Adolf Hitler, and an anti-Semitic white supremacist who is conspiring with Israel and Saudi Arabia in their campaign to destroy Iran and Syria, which are allies of his Russian masters, as is Venezuela, which he is also menacing, and that Jeremy Corbyn’s secret plan is to turn the UK into Nazi Germany, with the support of Trump, who is trying to destroy him, and that the Yellow Vests are Russian-backed fascists, and that Julian Assange is a rapist spy who conspired with Russia to get Trump elected, which is why Trump wants to prosecute him, just as soon as he finishes wiping out the Jews, or protecting them from Jeremy Corbyn, or from Iran, or brainwashing Black Americans into reelecting him in 2020 with a handful of Russian Facebook ads.

Go ahead, try to reconcile all that … or whatever, don’t. Just take whatever medication you happen to be on, crank up CNN, MSNBC, or any other corporate media channel, and report me to the Internet Police for posting dangerous “extremist” content. You know, in your heart, I probably deserve it.

#

CJ Hopkins
June 13, 2019
Photo: The Jewish Chronicle

[image error]

DISCLAIMER:
The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and
self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the
views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its staff, or any of
its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Patreon page (where you can contribute as little $1 per month), or send your contribution to his PayPal account,
so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our
staff up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical
dystopian novel, Zone 23, which we understand is pretty gosh darn funny, or any of his subversive stage plays,
which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not
appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive
email, please feel free to contact him directly.

The Quds Day Panic of 2019

So it appears we managed to survive another terrifying Quds Day in Berlin. It was certainly touch and go there for a while, what with the media issuing hysterical warnings about the hordes of “Hamas and Hezbollah supporters, neo-Nazis, and conspiracy theorists” that were going to materialize out of the ether, goose-step down the Kurfürstendamm, and reenact Kristallnacht, or something. The city was braced for an all-out Perso-Palestinian Quds Day Pogrom, which is always a threat on Quds Day in Berlin, but the hysteria level this year was elevated, due to the Anti-Semitism Pandemic that mysteriously erupted in 2016 for no apparent reason whatsoever.

OK, what, you’re probably asking, is Quds Day? It’s an annual event initiated by Iran to show support for the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism. It takes place on the last Friday of Ramadan, in opposition to Israel’s Jerusalem Day, the national holiday commemorating Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. In Berlin, there’s an annual Quds Day march, which the German media typically respond to by whipping up anti-Semitism hysteria and fanatical, guilt-ridden support for Israel. This year was no exception … on the contrary.

A week or so before the event, Felix Klein, Germany’s “Commissioner for Jewish Life and the Fight Against Anti-Semitism,” warned Jews not to wear kippahs in public, on account of the unprecedented explosion of anti-Semitism throughout the country. According to the interior ministry, there were 62 violent anti-Semitic attacks in Germany during 2018, compared to 37 in 2017, which, in a nation of 83 million people, and with a history of real-life, goose-stepping Nazis, and of perpetrating the Holocaust, and so on … well, you can understand the Commissioner’s alarm.

The international corporate media began spreading the news that Anti-Semitism was once again on the march in Germany. The BBC reported that official figures showed that 1,646 hate crimes had been committed against Jews in 2018, up 10% from 2017! CNN reported that anti-Semitic hate crimes had increased by almost 20%! According to The Jerusalem Post, there were 1,800 anti-Semitic incidents committed against Jews in 2018! It was almost as if the Anti-Semitism Pandemic was retroactively metastasizing right before our eyes.

But whatever. The statistics don’t really matter. The point was, “Jews are not safe in Germany!” The Putin-Nazis had teamed up with the Iranian Nazis and the Syrian Nazis, who were backing the Palestinian Nazis, whose irrational hatred of the State of Israel the German Nazis had somehow weaponized (probably with a bunch of fake Facebook ads), and they were all going to storm the historic high-end shopping boulevard of West Berlin!

Then, on Friday, the day before Quds Day, in a desperate, last-minute, tactical manouver, German politicians and cultural figures exhorted Jews and gentiles alike to defiantly wear their kippahs on Quds Day. BILD, the leading German tabloid, even printed little cut-out “BILD kippas” (complete with meticulous assembly instructions), and called on Germans to wear them on Quds Day to show their solidarity with State of Israel … uh, sorry, I meant with the Jewish people.

The BILD kippa tactic was a huge success! On Quds Day, fewer than a thousand people, many of them women and children, peacefully strolled along the Kurfürstendamm chanting slogans like “free, free Palestine,” and asking the world to stop the Israelis from penning people up in de facto ghettos, shooting their legs off with dum dum bullets, demolishing their houses, hospitals, and schools, stealing their land, randomly murdering them, and otherwise behaving like sadistic fascists. The hordes of “Hamas and Hezbollah supporters, neo-Nazis, and conspiracy theorists” that the corporate media had warned us were coming, oddly, never showed their faces … clearly, the “BILD kippas” scared them off.

Or maybe it was the counter-demonstrators. Hundreds of anti-anti-Semites, including prominent German government officials, Israeli diplomats, Antifa factions, members of the local Jewish community, and BILD susbscribers confronted the march, wearing kippahs, waving Israeli flags, displaying giant “MAGA” banners, shouting “long live Israel” and “free Gaza from Hamas,” and giving the marchers the finger, and so on (which, OK, I found a little confusing, as, the last time I checked, Trump was still Hitler, and Antifa were supposedly a bunch of anarchists).

In any event, the hysteria has subsided. Berlin and Israel appear to have survived. The Jews can come back out of hiding, although it isn’t quite clear whether Germany wants them to wear their kippahs in public or not now. Hopefully, we’ll be receiving some sort of official directive from Commissioner Klein (or possibly Axel Springer) about that.

But, seriously, you can’t really blame the Germans for a going a little overboard with their anti-anti-Semitism hysteria or for being reluctant to criticize Israel. It wasn’t all that long ago that their parents and grandparents were heiling Hitler and systematically murdering millions of Jews, or looking the other way while it happened. Most of the Germans I’m acquainted with still feel kind of awful about that. Which isn’t terribly surprising, is it?

I mean, imagine, if you’re one of my American readers, if some other country conquered the USA, and put our political and military leaders on trial for all the war crimes they’ve committed, and for the millions of people they’ve systematically murdered, and taught our children the truth about our history … that might give you some idea of how most Germans feel about the Nazis and the Holocaust.

So, yes, Germans are a bit hypersensitive about anything resembling anti-Semitism, and they tend to conflate opposition to Israel with hatred of the Jewish people (despite the fact that Israel is doing a pretty convincing impression of the Nazis, what with its ethnic cleansing, walls, ghettos, sadistic goons, propaganda, and so on). Many Germans also overcompensate for their feelings of shame about the Holocaust by displaying an awkward fascination and enthusiasm for anything “Jewish” (you know, like many liberal Americans fetishize Native and African Americans), so that might explain the “BILD kippa” nonsense.

No, I’m not mocking or scolding the Germans … they’re still trying to work their history out. I’m just trying to track the propaganda and cynical emotional manipulation that we are increasingly being subjected to as the global capitalist ruling classes wage their War on Populism. The Quds Day Panic of 2019 is just one example. There are many more, both manufactured and all-too-real. The Charlottesville Nazis. Charlottesville II. The MAGA bomber. The Tree of Life shooting. The Christchurch attack. Jussie Smollett. MAGA hat Smirk Boy. And the list goes on … pretty much as it always has.

I’m sorry if this comes as a shock to anyone, but the world has always contained a minority of racist and anti-Semitic whack jobs. They didn’t suddenly start murdering people when Brexit passed and Trump got elected. They’ve been doing that for quite some time. And of course there is still anti-Semitism in Germany. Saxony is crawling with neo-Nazis. And Iran really would like to wipe out Israel, just as Israel would like to wipe out Iran. None of this is in any way new or shocking to anyone who has been paying attention.

The only thing that has significantly changed since November 8, 2016, is the official narrative we are being fed, in which anyone opposing global capitalism and the hegemony of neoliberal ideology is either a Russian or some kind of Nazi, and a new “anti-Semitism” or “fascism” panic is whipped up for us on a monthly basis.

The Quds Day Panic of 2019 (like the Charlottesville Kristallnacht of 2017) is going to be rerun, over and over, in endless variations, until 2020, or whenever the global capitalist ruling classes manage to restore Normality. By that time Israeli sports teams will probably be wearing little Palestinians on their caps, Julian Assange will be locked away in Supermax, and satirists like me … well, I think you know.

#

CJ Hopkins

June 5, 2019

Photo: Jüdische Allgemeine

[image error]DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Patreon page (where you can contribute as little $1 per month), or send your contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our staff up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian novel, Zone 23, which we understand is pretty gosh darn funny, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, please feel free to contact him directly.

Democracy vs. The Putin-Nazis

Back in January 2018, I wrote this piece about The War on Dissent, which, in case you haven’t noticed, is going gangbusters. As predicted, the global capitalist ruling classes have been using every weapon in their arsenal to marginalize, stigmatize, delegitimize, and otherwise eliminate any and all forms of dissent from neoliberal ideology, and in particular from their new official narrative … “Democracy versus The Putin-Nazis.”

For over two years, the corporate media have been pounding out an endless series of variations on this major theme, namely, that “democracy is under attack” by a conspiracy of Russians and neo-Nazis that magically materialized out of the ether during the Summer of 2016. The intelligence agencies, political elites, academia, celebrities, social media personalities, and other organs of the culture industry have been systematically reifying this official narrative through constant repetition. The Western masses have been inundated with innumerable articles, editorials, television news and talk show segments, books, social media posts, and various other forms of messaging whipping up hysteria over “Russians” and “fascists.” At this point, it is no longer just propaganda. It has become the new “truth.” It has become “reality.”

Becoming “reality” is, of course, the ultimate goal of every ideology. An ideology is just a system of ideas, and is thus fair game for critique and dissent. “Reality” is not fair game for dissent. It is not up for debate or challenge, not by “serious,” “legitimate” people. “Reality” is simply “the way it is.” It is axiomatic. It is apothegmatic. It’s not a belief or an interpretation. It is not subject to change or revision. It is the immortal, immutable Word of God … or whatever deity or deity-like concept the ruling classes and the masses they rule accept as the Final Arbiter of Truth. In our case, this would be Science, or Reason, rather than some supernatural being, but in terms of ideology there isn’t much difference. Every system of belief, regardless of its nature, ultimately depends on political power and power relations to enforce its beliefs, which is to say, to make them “real.”

OK, whenever I write about “reality” and “truth,” I get a few rather angry responses from folks who appear to think I’m denying the existence of objective reality. I’m not … for example, this chair I’m sitting on is absolutely part of objective reality, a physical object that actually exists. The screen you’re probably reading these words on is also part of objective reality. I am not saying there is no reality. What I’m saying is, “reality” is a concept, a concept invented and developed by people … a concept that serves a variety of purposes, some philosophical, some political. It’s the political purposes I’m interested in.

Think of “reality” as an ideological tool … a tool in the hands of those with the power to designate what is “real” and what isn’t. Doctors, teachers, politicians, police, scientists, priests, pundits, experts, parents — these are the enforcers of “reality.” The powerless do not get to decide what is “real.” Ask someone suffering from schizophrenia. Or … I’m sorry, is it bipolar disorder? Or oppositional defiant disorder? I can’t keep all these new disorders psychiatrists keep “discovering” straight.

Or ask a Palestinian living in Gaza. Or the mother of a Black kid the cops shot for no reason. Ask Julian Assange. Ask the families of all those “enemy combatants” Obama droned. Ask the “conspiracy theorists” on Twitter digitally screaming at anyone who will listen about what is and isn’t “the truth.” Each of them will give you their version of “reality,” and you and I may agree with some of them, and some of their beliefs may be supported with facts, but that will not make what they believe “reality.”

Power is what makes “reality” “reality.” Not facts. Not evidence. Not knowledge. Power.

Those in power, or aligned with those in power, or parroting the narratives of those in power, understand this (whether consciously or not). Those without power mostly do not, and thus we continue to “speak truth to power,” as if those in power gave a shit. They don’t. The powerful are not arguing with us. They are not attempting to win a debate about what is and isn’t “true,” or what did or didn’t “really” happen. They are declaring what did or didn’t happen. They are telling us what is and is not “reality,” and demonstrating what happens to those who disagree.

The “Democracy versus The Putin-Nazis” narrative is our new “reality,” whether we like it or not. It does not matter one iota that there is zero evidence to support this narrative, other than the claims of intelligence agencies, politicians, the corporate media, and other servants of the ruling classes. The Russians are “attacking democracy” because the ruling classes tell us they are. “Fascism is on the march again” because the ruling classes say it is. Anyone who disagrees is a “Putin-sympathizer,” a “Putin-apologist,” or “linked to Russia,” or “favored by Russia,” or an “anti-Semite,” or a “fascist apologist.”

Question the official narrative about the Gratuitously Baby Gassing Monster of Syria and you’re an Assad apologist, a Russian bot network, or a plagiarizing Red-Brown infiltrator. Criticize the corporate media for disseminating cheap McCarthyite smears, and you’re a Tulsi-stanning Hindu Nazi-apologist. God help you if you should appear on FOX, in which case you are a Nazi-legitimizer! A cursory check of the Internet today revealed that “far-right Facebook groups are spreading hate to millions in Europe” by means of some sort of hypnogenic content that just looking at it turns you into a Nazi. Our democracy-loving friends at The Atlantic Council are disappointed by Trump’s refusal to sign the “Christchurch Call,” a multilateral statement encouraging corporations to censor the Internet … and fascism is fashionable in Italy again!”

This post-Orwellian, neo-McCarthyite mass hysteria is not going to stop … not until the global capitalist ruling classes have suppressed the current “populist” insurgency and restored “normality” throughout the Western world. Until then, it’s going to be pretty much non-stop “Democracy versus the Putin-Nazis.”

So, unless you’re enjoying our new “reality,” or are willing to conform to it for some other reason, prepare to be smeared as “a Russia-loving, Putin-apologizing conspiracy theorist,” or a “fascism-enabling, Trump-loving Nazi,” or some other type of insidiously Slavic, white supremacist, mass-murder enthusiast. Things are only going to get uglier as the American election season ramps up. I mean, come on … you don’t really believe that the global capitalist ruling classes are going to let Trump serve a second term, do you?

#

CJ Hopkins

May 23, 2019

Photo: UpNorth

[image error]DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Patreon page (where you can contribute as little $1 per month), or send your contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our staff up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian novel, Zone 23, which we understand is pretty gosh darn funny, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, please feel free to contact him directly.

The Disinformationists

So, the election-meddling Putin-Nazi disinformationists are at it again! Oh yes, while Americans have been distracted by Russiagate, Obstructiongate, Redactiongate, or whatever it’s being called at this point, here in Europe, we are purportedly being bombarded with Russian “disinformation” aimed at fomenting confusion and chaos in advance of the upcoming EU elections, which are due to take place in less than two weeks.

The New York Times reports that an entire “constellation” of social media accounts “linked to Russia and far-right groups” is disseminating extremist “disinformation,” “encouraging discord,” and “amplifying distrust in the centrist parties that have governed for decades.” These accounts share some of the same “digital fingerprints,” and are engaging in “tactics” similar to the “tactics used in previous Russian attacks,” notably the Kremlin’s notorious mass-brainwashing of millions of defenseless African Americans with those deceptive anti-masturbation memes during the 2016 elections.

Now, this is not just a bunch of nonsense dressed up with authoritative-sounding lingo. No, The Times spoke to “analysts” and “advocacy groups,” which informed them that certain websites in Italy “share the same signatures” as certain other websites sharing certain “pro-Kremlin views.” Moreover, two “political groups” in Germany used the same Internet service providers as those “Russian hackers” who attacked our democracy by stealing those Democratic Party emails that transformed Americans overnight into a nation of Trump-loving white supremacists!

That hasn’t happened here in Europe yet, but I’m not sure how much longer we can hold out against this relentless onslaught. According to an “analysis” concocted by some cloud-based cybersecurity firm and authoritatively cited by Politico, at this point, “more than half of Europeans might have seen some form of disinformation” spread by “Russians” on social media. They might have been exposed to “extremist views” and “amplified content” possibly produced by the far-right Alternative for Germany party, and even (God help them!) supporters of Brexit.

SafeGuard Cyber (the cybersecurity firm in question, which offers “digital risk protection and empowers businesses to embrace new technologies,” or whatever mumbo jumbo it says on their website) identified, and is now presumably surveilling on a more or less around the clock basis, “a vast network of automated social media accounts allegedly controlled by Russian actors” which is spreading this “amplified extremist content.”

Although Politico “was unable to independently verify” whether the social media accounts the SafeGuard Cyber analysis “identified” (and used to generate a meaningless graph) were in any way actually linked to Russia, and although SafeGuard Cyber would not provide Politico with a list of the users it assured Politico were “linked to Russia,” SafeGuard Cyber’s CTO informed Politico that his team of experts had used “more than 50 identifiers,” among them, the location from which the messages were sent and “activity linked to Russian interests,” to identify these “Russian actors” who are exposing innocent Europeans and expatriate Americans like myself to Lord knows what kind of jargon-laden, dangerously amplified, extremist content in order to disinform and confuse us.

And it’s not just the upcoming EU elections that the Putin-Nazi disinformationists are targeting. An outfit called Global Security Review, which “publishes objective, solutions-oriented insight into geopolitical issues” which can be authoritatively referenced by the corporate media to lend whatever story they are pushing an air of credibility, warn that Russia is conducting a campaign to “overwhelm democracies” with disinformation! According to the experts at GSR, Putin-Nazi disinformationists working for Russia Today and Sputnik brainwashed the citizens of Catalonia into voting for their independence from Spain with a network of bots (or “zombie accounts”). In France, they brainwashed the Gilets Jaunes protesters into attacking the windows of upscale stores and setting fire to luxury vehicles by “magnifying the brutality of the French police,” who have been doing their utmost to show restraint as they shoot people’s eyes out with rubber bullets and indiscriminately tear-gas the hell out of everyone.

And then there’s the evil Russian spywhale, which the disinformationists want us to believe is just a harmless “therapy Beluga” for kids, but which has clearly been strapped with some sort of monstrous, mind-controlling apparatus that enables the Kremlin to remotely implant a host of dangerous “populist” ideas in the brains of defenseless Norwegian fishermen, weaponizing them into a horde of neo-Odinist Viking berserkers who will scream down out of Scandinavia and storm the EU Parliament in Brussels smelling of akvavit and fermented shark.

These Putin-Nazi disinformationists are not to be confused with the corporate media, or other sources of real information, like SafeGuard Cyber, Global Security Review, Bellingcat, Integrity Initiative, The Atlantic Council, E.U. East StratCom Task Force, Foreign Policy Research Institute, and countless other companies, foundations, think tanks, and intelligence agency fronts. These are legitimate information providers, who would never try to disinform the public to serve any sort of corporatist agenda, or to generate any kind of mass hysteria over “terrorists,” “Russians,” “fascists,” or “populists.”

OK, granted, these sources are not perfect, but it’s not like they intentionally lied about those non-existent WMDs in Iraq, or those babies that weren’t yanked out of their incubators, or those nerve gas canisters that Assad didn’t drop, or when Russia didn’t hack the Vermont power grid, or attack us with crickets, or hack into CSPAN, or “collude” with Trump via a secret server, or when Manafort didn’t meet with Assange, or when Corbyn didn’t lay a wreath for terrorists, and all the other things that didn’t happen … no, they just got their stories “wrong,” over and over, and over again.

Plus, what motive would they possibly have, these enormous corporate media conglomerates, and the transnational corporations that own them, and these intelligence agencies, and their fronts and cutouts, and corporate lobbyists and PR firms, and councils, and think tanks, and research institutes, to disinform the Western masses, or to manufacture an official narrative that allows them to systematically stigmatize, marginalize, criminalize, deplatform, demonetize, and otherwise eliminate any type of speech they deem to be “Russian disinformation,” or “extremist content,” or a “conspiracy theory,” or simply too “dangerous,” “divisive,” or “confusing” to circulate among the general public?

No … see? That makes no sense. That’s just an example of the type of fascist disinformation these Putin-Nazi disinformationists are trying to spread to confuse us to the point where we can’t even concentrate long enough to think anymore, or parse the meaningless jargon-laden nonsense they’re trying to deceive us with, and just devolve into these Pavlovian imbeciles conditioned to respond to specific trigger words, like “extremist,” “terrorist,” “fascist,” “populist,” “anti-Semitic,” “Russians,” “hackers,” and whatever other emotional stimuli we are being trained to instantly recognize and robotically react to like circus animals.

Or … I don’t know, maybe it isn’t. I’m not even sure what I’m trying to say. Probably they’ve already got to me. I’d better get back down into my anti-disinformation bunker, pull up The Guardian, or The Washington Post, or Der Spiegel on my child-proof computer, and immerse myself in some objective journalism, before the Putin-Nazi spywhale makes its way up the Landwehrkanal, takes control of what’s left of my mind, and forces me into going out and trying to vote for Hitler or something.

I recommend you do the same, and I’ll see you when this nightmare over.

#

CJ Hopkins

May 15, 2019

Photo: Deutsche Welle

[image error]DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Patreon page (where you can contribute as little $1 per month), or send your contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our staff up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian novel, Zone 23, which we understand is pretty gosh darn funny, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, please feel free to contact him directly.

An excerpt from Zone 23

Our in-house satirist has the flu, or a cold, or something, and hasn’t sent us a column. So we’re publishing a chapter from his satirical dystopian sci-fi novel, Zone 23. It’s extremely long, includes gratuitous footnotes, and is otherwise difficult to read on a phone. It’s available from the evil Amazon corporation and a variety of other online booksellers, or you can order it at your local bookstore, assuming you still have a local bookstore. Here it is without further ado …

Cramer

an excerpt from Zone 23

by C. J. Hopkins

The Global Proprietary Calendar System, commonly known as the G.P.C.S., and adopted throughout the United Territories in 2310, H.C.S.T., despite what you’d probably naturally assume, was not a retail calendar product (which is to say an actual calendar), or any type of calendar-related product, but an Interterritorial trade agreement completely deregulating and privatizing same. Despite the dire and hysterical warnings of 24th Century apocalypticians, professional naysayers, and other critics, the G.P.C.S. had been functioning smoothly for going on over three hundred years. Now this was totally revolutionary, because after nearly five millennia of government regulation of time, consumers were finally free to choose among a wide and ever-expanding array of proprietary annotated calendar systems, most of which were moderately priced or offered at competitive corporate discounts. By this time (the time of our story, of course, so 2610, H.C.S.T.), there were four predominant (i.e. widely used) calendars, and in excess of eighty “alternative” calendars, each of which generated spin-off products and assorted licensing and franchising streams. There were also a variety of open-source calendars, and amateur calendars, and vanity calendars, which consumers were equally free to choose among, and to use for business and personal purposes, and to personalize however they liked to express their individual tastes. The G.P.C.S. was extremely popular. The Normals just loved their proprietary calendars. The only minor problem was, no one knew when it was anymore.

This, however, if you asked Greg Cramer, was nothing more than a technical glitch, and a temporary technical glitch at that.

Gregory Cramer was Senior Vice President of Info-Management, Maintenance & Storage at the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin’s District 12 Northeast Regional Headquarters. He was forty-one years old, fit as a fiddle, and handsome in a completely unmemorable way. At approximately 0420 o’clock on a sleepy afternoon in officially March, he was staring into the physical screen of his HC Systems desktop Viewer, in the upper right-hand corner of which his biometric face was staring back at him. The face was smiling a becoming smile. There was nothing remotely reptilian about it. Its features were angular. Its forehead prominent. Its hairline was prematurely receding. It was receding right off the back of his head.

Cramer had an office on the 26th Floor with a view of some other 26th Floor office. There was nothing terribly wrong with his office, except that it was down on the 26th Floor. Which meant it that was not on the 70th Floor, or the 71st or 72nd Floors, in Interterritorial Security Management, which was run by Robert “Big Bob” Schirkenbeck. Cramer, of course, did not resent this (Zanoflaxithorinal relieved resentment) but he thought about it two or three times an hour as he read and responded to the thousands of queries that came up on his screen all day, most of which, in one way or another, concerned the question of when it really was. Cramer did not resent these queries, and was perfectly content to sit there and answer them (it being his job to do that and all), but somewhere, way in the back of his mind, he wondered idly whether, just possibly, some of them might not be so vital.

This one, for example, from Jim Matsumura, of TeleDynamic Systems, Inc., asking, basically, when it was. Or this one, from someone named Aksel Torres, who appeared to be some kind of salesman of something (probiotic shampoo, it looked like), beating around the bush a lot, but essentially wondering if anyone at Hadley happened to know when it really was. Which OK, here was a prime example of the kind of thing that tempted Cramer to walk the Path of Toxic Resentment, because obviously no one at Hadley did (i.e. happen to know when it really was), or why would Cramer be sitting in his office fielding queries regarding same, as opposed to sitting in some other office, on the 70th to 72nd Floors, let’s say, doing something that might conceivably get him noticed by Big Bob Schirkenbeck?

What Cramer didn’t actually consider doing (the hazy concept just drifted through his mind) was writing a boilerplate response-to-query message to send back to Jim and Aksel, and whoever, regretting the fact that neither he, nor anyone at Hadley, nor anyone else, was privy to when it really was … nor, as everyone plainly knew, would anyone be for quite some time, and wondering whether, on the next occasion they felt compelled to query him, again, regarding when it really was, they might refer back to this boilerplate message, or stop and think for a half a second (before they sent their latest query) about what they were about to do, and how utterly pointless and inane it was.

This hypothetical boilerplate message, which Cramer would never even consciously contemplate much less actually set about writing would be written in terse yet extremely professional, demonstrably compassionate, irony-free language, in compliance with both the letter and spirit of Hadley Communications Policy. But terse. The message would definitely be terse. Terse, in this case, would be appropriate … because, seriously, Cramer thought to himself (and he made a mental note to up his dosage), what did it matter when it really was? Everyone knew when it was officially. The date was right there on the screen of your Viewer. Depending on which calendar you followed, it was 04 March, 2610, or 16 Sha´ban, 2049, or 17 Adar, 6370, or day Whatever in the Year of the Lemur, and all the other dates it officially was.

In Cramer’s personal professional opinion, which he shared in his weekly online check-ins with Charmane T.R. Haverson-Cho, the fairly-abundant Department Head of Info-Management, Maintenance & Storage who was never going to help him transfer anywhere and had zero suction with Big Bob Schirkenbeck, the G.P.C.S. was running smoothly. The one little minor ongoing glitch (i.e. the one that people like Jim Matsumura and Aksel Torres were all worked up about), was that even there, in the Western Territories, where most people tended to use the same calendar, although you were free to choose, of course, the dates had been changed so many times that you couldn’t work back from whenever it was to whenever it had been before they’d changed them, and even if you did, or thought you had, by the time you did, they’d have changed them again, which meant you would have to start all over, which would mean going back to whenever it was (i.e. the post-adjusted current date), and reentering the dates of whatever events you’d chosen to use as your set of variables, and then trying to rerun your algorithm, only to discover that one or more of the dates of your variables had also been adjusted, so you’d have to go back and adjust for that, and then start the entire process all over.

Naturally, one was free to do this. The system wouldn’t prevent you from trying. All that would happen was, after a while, this no-reply message would come up on your screen reminding you that dates and events were tentative, due to the Reconstruction Project, and so really what you were sitting there doing was probably just a waste of time. The text of these messages varied slightly, but the essential content was always the same. One was advised to do one’s best, and to plan for further, albeit diminishing, chrono- and philological adjustments, on a more or less randomly-occurring basis, out into the foreseeable future, and to otherwise, basically, have a nice day.

How had things gotten into such a state? No one really knew for certain, but the official story went something like this …

Back in the early 24th Century, at the dawn of the Age of Emergency Measures, Future/Past-Continuous, Inc., a not-for-profit corporation founded but neither owned nor controlled by The Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin, and run by a consortium of global corporations representing most, if not all, of the Territories, had been charged with the almost impossible task of reconstructing recorded history, the majority of which had been obliterated, or overwritten with malicious intent, during what was called The Age of Anarchy, which most intelligent people agreed, had, at some point, actually occurred. Intelligent people agreed on this primarily because the official story (the details of which were subject to change as Future/Past-Continuous, Inc. unearthed new informational artifacts) consistently featured The Age of Anarchy, which preceded the Age of Emergency Measures, which everyone knew for a fact had occurred. The Age of Emergency Measures had ended in 2550, H.C.S.T., so anyone over the age of sixty had been alive then, and remembered it clearly, or at least well enough to be sure it had happened. Also, although the United Territories were enjoying a Renaissance of Freedom and Prosperity, a number of these Emergency Measures remained in effect in some remote locales.

According to the Reconstruction Project’s current tentative historical timeline, the Age of Anarchy officially began somewhere circa 2100, give or take a couple of decades, and ended circa 2300 (these dates being H.C.S.T., of course). So it had lasted, at minimum, two hundred years, and possibly longer, no one was sure. At one point, back in the 2580s, the inception date had been tentatively listed as sometime circa 1940, but now, the general feeling was, that that couldn’t be right, so it had been amended.

The point being, at least in the minds of the Normals, this Age of Anarchy (whatever the dates were) was like a bridge, a temporal bridge, stretched across a river of time, linking the present (i.e. the world they knew) to a distant pathological past, the facts of which were at best unproven, and at worst were purely hypothetical. Unfortunately (and this was the root of the problem), at some point during the Age of Anarchy, in the mid-to-late 22nd Century, it was thought, this temporal bridge to the distant past had been tactically nuked beyond all recognition. In other words, nobody actually knew what had happened during this Age of Anarchy … or when, or where, or why it had happened, or not in any definitive way.

Thus, for over two hundred years, or as long as anyone alive could remember, the official dates of The Age of Anarchy (as well as the dates of the events it comprised, along with the facts of those events themselves) had been continually adjusted, and revised, and rewritten, as Future/Past-Continuous, Inc. discovered and correlated new information. This, in turn, it went without saying, had triggered the adjustment of any and all dates prior or subsequent to the dates in question (and the events to which said dates referred), which dates (and often the events themselves), prior to the latest adjustment, had been based on the original dates in question (of events which had or had not occurred).

Which OK, probably sounds confusing, but over time had gotten to be as routine as any other software update. You’d get this little message on your screen advising you that something that had always happened on 16 November, 2120, the Neu-Hohenschönhausen Unrest, in this case, had, it turned out, really happened on 23 June, 2119, pending official verification. And sometimes something that had always happened on 24 August, 2183, in this case, the North Mississauga Massacre, had actually never happened at all, and Haley Dean Morrison, the alleged perpetrator, had never been born in Halton Hills, or anywhere else, and had never existed, and the whole thing had just been invented out of whole cloth by anonymous “persons of malicious intent,” pending verification, of course. Pretty much every official date (and the alleged event that took place on that date) was pending some kind of verification, or pending the results of the correlation of other dates of possible influence.

Now as Cramer was fond of reminding people (in a needless to say professional manner), this monstrous historico-calendrical clusterfuck was in no way the fault of Future/Past-Continuous, or the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin. It was entirely the fault of the Cyberterrorists, the so-called “persons of malicious intent,” who had generated veritable shitloads of nonsense and hacked it into the historical records. These “persons of malicious intent” had made up people who’d never existed, falsified records of their births and deaths, and involved them, not just in major events, like the non-occurent North Mississauga Massacre, but also in mundane and meaningless events, which no one knew about, and which had never taken place. They had dreamed up fake international conflicts, insurgent struggles, earthquakes, floods, utterly useless consumer products, financial crises, sexual practices, medical conditions, mathematical theorems, et cetera, the list went on and on. Then, when whatever actually happened during the Age of Anarchy happened, which regardless of the details (which were being verified) was definitely some kind of global catastrophe, and with so much information destroyed, or written over, or rendered unreadable, whatever frame of reference there had been to help one distinguish the real from the fake had been twisted so hopelessly out of shape that no one could really say anymore, or not with any reliability, what had or hadn’t really happened.

However (and this was the crucial point, it being more or less the core assumption upon which the whole Reconstruction was based), the fact of The Age of Anarchy itself (i.e. the fact that it had actually occurred, and comprised a sequence of actual events, however subject to verification by Future/Past-Continuous, Inc.), while of course one was free to say what one wanted, was not a fact that was up for debate or inquisitive discussion by serious people. Not that any such discussion, or debate, was in any way officially discouraged, or censored, or anything despotic like that. No, the subject just never seemed to come up. Future/Past-Continuous, Inc. was not, after all, some malevolent autocracy intentionally falsifying historical records to perpetually confuse and exhaust the public. On the contrary, it was a global consortium of well-respected corporate partners working on a strictly not-for-profit basis while maintaining the highest transparency standards. The entire Reconstruction Project was meticulously documented and available online. One could, if one was so inclined, access the records of every adjustment considered, debated and ultimately made, and the online discussions regarding those adjustments, and every advisory relating thereto, going back almost three hundred years, at the Reconstruction Project’s website: http://www.recon.proj.

Hardly anyone was so inclined. The Normals had better things to do with their time than wade through zetabytes of digital records verifying the verification of obscure and irrelevant historical data, and anyway there were people who did that, oversight committees or whatever they were … and the simple fact of the matter was, nobody really cared when it was. Well, OK, sure, some people cared, professional historians, heortologists and such, and Future/Past-Continuous, Inc., and other corporations whose products and services depended on the Reconstruction Project, and investors in these corporations. But that was different, because all these parties cared in a strictly professional capacity. They understood that it might take centuries to figure out when it really was. And thus, in the meantime, what was the point of querying Cramer over and over? There was no point. That was the point. And was why these professionals didn’t do that. Because they understood how pointless it was. As long as the folks at Future/Past-Continuous were in the process of working it all out (i.e deciding what had actually happened and assigning specific dates to that stuff), and then posting it all on the World Wide Web in a way that made some narrative sense, what did it possibly matter to anyone whether the Neu-Hohenschönhausen Unrest had happened in 2119, or in 2120, or 2130, or when the Visigoths had entered Rome, or in which American Civil War the Battle of Port Royal Sound had been fought?

The answer was, it didn’t matter, except to cognitively-challenged persons, like Jim Matsumura and Aksel Torres, and the thousands of other inveterate losers whose queries it was Cramer’s job to answer, rather than it being his job (for example) to assist in Regional Security Services, or even Regional A.S.P. Management, where Cramer’s talents and exemplary soft-skills would surely be noticed by Big Bob Schirkenbeck. Info-Management, Maintenance & Storage was nowhere anywhere near the vicinity of Big Bob Schirkenbeck’s radar screen, which Cramer needed to appear upon if he ever wanted to get anywhere at Hadley, at least within its Security divisions.

Security, Cramer sensed, was his Path, or was one of his Path(s), and he wasn’t on it, or in it, or anywhere near its vicinity. He was forty-four floors below its vicinity. He’d been there forever, almost a year. During this year he’d surreptitiously downloaded, digitally copied and carefully analyzed every available Hadley organogram, and he had yet to find one viable route from Info-Management, Maintenance & Storage to any Schirkenbeck-run division. He’d transferred down there from Consumer Collections, mostly for the Senior VP title, but also because he had heard a rumor that Charmane T.R. Haverson-Cho, the fairly-abundant Department Head of Info-Management, Maintenance & Storage, had some kind of suction with Big Bob Schirkenbeck, which it turned out later she did not have. Cramer found out who’d started this rumor, and he’d prayed to the One for forgiveness, of course, because holding on to resentments was toxic, and borderline Anti-Social behavior, but he had not forgotten the name of this person, who according to the ironclad law of Karma would someday reap what he had sown. In the meantime, however, he needed out of Info-Management, Maintenance & Storage. And he needed out on a vaguely upward Big Bob Schirkenbeck-oriented vector. Which it seemed one could not locate from here, or from anywhere else one could locate from here. Wherever this vector originated was somewhere Cramer could not locate.

Another query came in on his screen, this one from someone named Meredith Moone, who claimed to be some sort of entertainer and needed to know when it really was. Cramer watched from outside his body as his finger reached toward the screen and very nearly deleted the query, but he caught himself at the very last second. He pushed back from his desk in horror. He couldn’t believe he’d almost done that. Deleting a query, or any other form of written or verbal communication, was tantamount to professional suicide, and doing so with knowledge and forethought was technically an act of corporate sabotage.

Now as terrifying as this moment was, this near total loss of control on his part, it was also a blessing, as Cramer knew, as it meant that he had now hit bottom. Which meant that any second now … yes, here it came, his Moment of Clarity. He got out physical pen and paper (which he could carry out with him, and dispose of later) and set about taking fearless inventory.

At some point in the recent past, weeks or possibly months before (it didn’t matter exactly when), he had stopped surrendering to the Will of One and started surrendering to his own Self Will, which had led him down a destructive Path, and now to this nearly self-destructive act. He hadn’t consciously chosen to do this, but nonetheless he’d chosen to do this. He’d done this out of fear, of course (he wrote the word FEAR in upper case letters), RESENTMENT (ditto), SELF-CENTERED THINKING, and FEAR OF INSUFFICIENT ABUNDANCE, and ENVY OF THOSE WITH GREATER ABUNDANCE, and a number of other standard phrases he had memorized from The Path(s) to Prosperity. He drew little circles around these phrases, and lines from these circles to other circles, in which he scribbled selected keywords referring back to events in his childhood that had triggered these negative fears and resentments, which every Variant-Positive experienced, but each in their own individualized way. Between, and around, and intersecting these circles, he drew another series of lines, which he labeled with the names of the destructive Path(s) that corresponded to his fears and resentments and to each of their respective triggering events. The upshot of all this scribbling was, through a series of resentment- and fear-based choices, he had wandered off his spiritual Path, and away from the light of unlimited abundance, and that was why he stuck down there in Info-Management, Maintenance & Storage.

Now at this point he had about forty-five seconds to take advantage of this Moment of Clarity and resurrender to the Will of the One before his own Self Will took over and set him back on some negative Path. Cramer knew this. He had been here before, and had weathered other such spiritual crises. The first thing he needed to do was surrender. He could not think his way out of this mess. His thinking is what had gotten him into it. Thinking was what he needed to surrender. What he needed now was not a plan, but was, rather, a miracle, an act of Grace, a transdivisional karmic intervention from one of the infinite Many of the One. He took out his personal All-in-One (i.e. not his Hadley-issued Viewer), pulled up his dog-eared digital copy of The Path(s) to Prosperity and clicked at random. The following passage came up on his screen:

“The Unseeking Seeker, seeking the One, seeks but the Unseeking Self of the Seeker, mistaking the Unseeking Self of the Seeker for Seeking Self of the Unseeking Seeker. In so doing, the Unseeking Seeker, taking the Unseeking Self of the Seeker for one of the Aspects of the Oneness of the One, walks the Path(s) of Separation, Deprivation and Spiritual Delusion, perceiving only the Multiplicity, and never the Abundant Oneness of the One. In contrast to the Unseeking Seeker, the Seeking Seeker, seeking the One, seeks but the Seeking Self of the Seeker, knowing the Seeking Self of the Seeker to be but one Aspect of the Oneness of the One. In so doing, the Seeking Seeker, perceiving the Oneness of the Multiplicity, and knowing this Oneness to be but one Aspect of the Multiplicitous Oneness of the One, walks the Path(s) of Surrender and Detachment, opening the Self to Infinite Abundance.”

Believe it or not, this particular passage, which Cramer had chosen totally at random, and that to anyone unfamiliar with the Path(s) probably sounded like gobbledegook, was exactly what he needed to read at that moment. Not that he understood a word of it, but understanding was not the point. The point was, he needed to reopen his Self, abandon the Path of Separation, Deprivation and Spiritual Delusion, and reseek the Path(s) of Surrender and Detachment, ideally in some sort of unseeking way. He needed to actively (i.e. physically) do this, immediately, right there in his office. He checked to make sure the door was locked, then he got down on his knees and prayed.

All of this was more or less standard procedure for Normals in states of spiritual crisis … reaching one’s bottom, the Moment of Clarity, opening The Path(s) to a random passage, and interpreting whatever the passage said as instructions for how to get out the crisis. The Path(s) to Prosperity was not just another essentially useless sacred text, like the Christian Bible, the Torah, the Qur’an, the Sutras, the Vedas, or Bhagavad Gita. It was more like a spiritual owner’s manual (which came with a metaphysical roadmap), the vehicle in this case being your soul, or spirit, or purusha, or whatever you called it.

Which is to say, it actually worked.

It didn’t matter what you believed (you could stay a Christian, or a Muslim, or a Jew, or a Buddhist, or whatever it was you were) as long as you could also accept the central, spiritually revolutionary concept upon which The Path(s) to Prosperity was based, namely, that Abundance was infinitely available to anyone and everyone, without conditions, and that all you had to do was apprehend that, and reach out and take as much as you wanted. Abundance meant not just material Abundance (i.e. money, which it certainly meant), but also emotional and spiritual Abundance, which according to Chapters 1 through 9, 12, 15 and Endnote 40, were the sources from which material Abundance, despite all appearances, ultimately emanated.

Opening one’s Self to unlimited Abundance (“partaking in the Infinite Oneness of the One”) was the goal of the program, which one attained by following a series of simple Steps, and meditating and praying regularly, and visualizing infinite Abundance. While the wording of these Steps was lucid enough to be understood by a six year-old child, the philosophy underlying the Path(s), and the multiplicitous Oneness of the One, was actually rather challenging to grasp, or was impossible to grasp, or was utter nonsense. In essence, what it all boiled down to was that every lack, or temporary shortfall, of spiritual and/or material Abundance could be ascribed to the same basic error … misapprehension of the Oneness of of the One. For example, attempting to define the One led straight to the Path of Knowing the Unknowable, whereas questioning the infinite nature of the One, one walked the Path of Proving the Unprovable. Failure to meet the terms of one’s debts, including, but not limited to, timely payment of interest thereon, was Walking the Path of Attaining the Unattainable. Making unauthorized copies at work was Walking the Path of Possessing the Unpossessable. And these were just a few of the negative Path(s). Walking any one of these negative Path(s) invariably led to diminished Abundance, and conversely, diminished Abundance proved that one was walking such a negative Path. And so on. The point was, diminished Abundance was never the result of external factors. It was always the result of some unconscious choice, which was based on some spiritual misapprehension. And thus the question (for the Seeker in crisis) was never how to change the world (i.e. something in the actual physical world). The question was always how to change the way one perceived, or apprehended, the world, and above all else the choices one made, not one’s conscious choices, of course, but one’s unconscious, or Karmic choices.

Cramer, down on his knees on the carpet, strategically positioned so as not to be seen by the person in the office across from his office, who sometimes glanced in Cramer’s direction, and looked to be about his age, but whose hairline was only slightly receding, knew all this, this stuff about choices, and the Path(s), and so on, to be the truth. This knowledge was not a matter of faith. This knowledge was fact. It was cause and effect. Choosing Abundance produced Abundance, as anyone abundant was living proof. Big Bob Schirkenbeck was a shining example. Here was a man who was clearly walking one or more of the The Path(s) to Prosperity. Here was a man who had chosen Abundance. Serious Abundance. Unlimited Abundance. This was a man who understood the Game, who understood that winning the Game was never just a matter of defeating your opponent in a crushingly decisive and humiliating way, but was always, ultimately, an expression of your Self, your Will to Win … your Will to Abundance. Which was really, in the end, what it all came down to, and was nothing less than the seminal axiom upon which The Path(s) of Prosperity was based. Winners won, and losers lost, not because of random factors like physical strength, intellectual prowess, or access to readily available capital. Winners won because they chose to win. They chose success. They chose Abundance. And in so doing they affirmed Abundance, and they affirmed the infinite Oneness of the One. The obverse, sadly, was also true. Losers lost because they chose to lose. They chose to fail. They chose to suffer. And in so doing they denied Abundance, and they denied the infinite Oneness of the One.

Cramer, whose ankles were starting to cramp, fervently believed in the Oneness of the One, and in the loving, compassionate Will thereof, and that everything that happened was a matter of choice. So somehow he had chosen this challenge. Somewhere in this trap he was in was some kind of karmic lesson to be learned. He prayed to the One to be taught this lesson, and for the One to guide him back onto his Path(s), and to make him more like Big Bob Schirkenbeck, and to send him a sign and …

His intercom rang.

“Yes?”

“Sorry to bother you, Greg.”

“What is it, Gloria?” he said, from the floor.

“There’s a Kyle Bentley-Briggs on line three for you, Greg.”

Cramer’s virtual assistant, Gloria, reminded Cramer of this dental hygienist he’d dated once, for like forty-five minutes. He’d been asking to have her voice reprogrammed, but the IT guys had been slow to respond.

“I’ll call him back.”

“All right, Greg.”

“Thank you, Gloria.”

“Oh, and Greg?”

“Yes?”

“He mentioned a Security matter. I thought you’d want to …”

Cramer’s heart stopped.

“Security?!”

He leapt up and reached for his phone.

“I’ll go ahead and take that message for you, Greg.”

“No! Wait! Gloria! Wait!”

“Yes, Greg?”

“Put him through.”

“All right, Greg. Transferring now.”

Cramer closed his eyes and prayed.

“Greg, it’s Kyle.”

“Kyle, buddy! How the heck are you?”

His eyes were still closed.

“Good. You?”

“Great.”

“Good. Is this a bad time?”

“No. What’s up?”

“Nothing … well … something, actually … I need to talk to you.”

“What’s going on?”

“It’s Valentina. She’s …”

Kyle choked up. Cramer was getting goosebumps now.

“I can’t … look, I’d rather not talk on the phone. Could you meet me somewhere?”

“Sure. When?”

“How about tonight? I know it’s short notice.”

“No. No problem. I’m here for you, buddy.”

Cramer took the call off speaker.

“Just tell me what we’re dealing with here. Gloria mentioned a Security matter …”

Several seconds of silence followed.

“Kyle? You there?”

“Listen, Greg … I can’t … I mean … they’re recording this, aren’t they?”

“What? This call?”

“Yeah.”

“You serious?”

“No?”

“This is Info-Management and Maintenance. Nothing going on on down here …”

Another few seconds of silence followed.

“Still … I’d rather talk in person.”

“How about Rosie’s? Twenty-one hundred?”

“Rosie’s.”

“Yeah. You remember Rosie’s?”

“Rosie’s … yeah. I can get there by then.”

“Where are you now?”

“I’m on the train.”

“The train?”

“Why? Is that a problem?”

Cramer winced.

“No, no problem. It’s just … it just doesn’t sound like the train.”

Another excruciating second of silence.

“Let’s talk tonight in person, OK?”

“Sure, no problem, and listen … Kyle?”

“Yeah?”

“Whatever this is, we’ll handle it.”

“Thanks, Greg.”

“Don’t mention it, buddy.”

“I didn’t know who else to call.”

“Absolutely. You did the right thing.”

Kyle clicked off. Cramer hung up. He sat there a moment, unable to breathe. Another query came in on his screen.

 

Or 6070, I.T.S.T, or 1740, I.M.S.T., or 2231, R.A.S.T, or the Year of the Neotropic Cormorant (not to be confused, as it often was, with the Year of the Double-Crested Cormorant).

Synchronization was not a problem. Proprietary dates were easily converted, and, naturally, after two or three centuries, people were used to the competing platforms.

This Herculean or Sisyphean effort was known as the Reconstruction Project.

Mostly metaphorically, of course, the bulk of the actual tactical nuking having already taken place at that point.

For example, according to The Path(s) to Prosperity, the One, an abstract singularity, did not contain but comprised the Many. The One was the Many, and the Many were One. Each of the Many were also One, each One of which comprised the Many, each and every One of which, when taken as a whole, comprised the One. Each One of the Many had infinite Aspects, each of which were also Aspects, not only of the One comprising that Many, but of every other One of the Many, which, ultimately, of course, were also One. Thus the Multiplicity of the One, notwithstanding the fact that each of these infinite Aspects was essentially singular, nevertheless retained its Oneness. All of these unique, singular Aspects, each no more than a grain of sand on an endless beach that stretched throughout the infinite fabric of Space-Time itself, beginning in its end, ending in its beginning, together comprised a meta-singularity, the Multiplicitous Oneness of the One, which after years of meditation and contemplation of The Path(s) to Prosperity one came to know by its other name, the Oneness of the Unnameable One. Later, after many more years of meditation, contemplation, and attendance at various retreats and seminars, one came to understand that these various “names” were really just provisional names, substitutes for the Nameless Name, which no one knew, and could never be spoken. Consciousness being but one of its Aspects, how could one ever know the One? One couldn’t, or not entirely, anyway. Even those with limited Knowledge, and one could always tell who they were, as Abundance flowed like a stream toward them, knew and accepted the limits of their Knowledge, which acceptance then increased their Knowledge, which increased their Abundance, and on, and on.

Photo: Jordan Richmond/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

[image error]DISCLAIMER: The preceding excerpt is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Patreon page (where you can contribute as little $1 per month), or send your contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our staff up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian novel, Zone 23, which we understand is pretty gosh darn funny, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, please feel free to contact him directly.

Obstructiongate!

I owe the corporate media an apology. For the last few years, I’ve been writing all these essays explaining how they were perpetrating an enormous psyop on the American public … a psyop designed to convince the public that Donald Trump “colluded” with Russia to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton. Up until a few days ago, I would have sworn that they had published literally thousands of articles and editorials, and broadcast countless TV segments, more or less accusing him of treason, and being a “Russian intelligence asset,” and other ridiculous stuff like that. Also, and I’m still not sure how this happened, I somehow got the idea in my head that the investigation that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was meticulously conducting had something to do with Donald Trump conspiring or “colluding” with Russia, or being some kind of “Manchurian president,” or being blackmailed by Putin with a pee-tape, or something.

In any event, the publication of the Mueller report has cleared things up for me. I get it now. The investigation was never about Trump colluding with Russia. It was always about Trump obstructing the investigation of the collusion with Russia that the investigation was not about. Mueller was never looking for collusion. It was not his job to look for collusion. His job was to look for obstruction of his investigation of alleged obstruction of his investigation of non-collusion, which he found, and detailed at length in his report, and which qualifies as an impeachable offense.

Not that he proved that there was no collusion! On the contrary, as professional hermeneuticists have been repeatedly pointing out on Twitter, given that Mueller wasn’t looking for collusion, and that collusion could never have been legally established, and isn’t even a legal term, Mueller’s failure to find any actual evidence of collusion is evidence of collusion, notwithstanding the fact that he couldn’t prove it, and wasn’t even looking for it, except to the extent it allowed him to establish a case for the obstruction he was actually investigating.

In other words, his investigation was launched in order to investigate the obstruction of his investigation. And, on those terms, it was a huge success. The fact that it didn’t prove “collusion” means nothing — that’s just a straw man argument that Trump and his Russian handlers make. The goal all along was to prove that Trump obstructed an investigation of his obstruction of that investigation, not that he was “colluding” with Putin, or any of the other paranoid nonsense that the corporate media were forced to report on, once an investigation into his obstruction of the investigation was launched.

See, and this is why I owe the media an apology. All those thousands of hysterical articles, editorials, and TV segments accusing Donald Trump of treason, and of literally being a Russian agent, and probably Putin’s homosexual lover, were not just ridiculous propaganda. The corporate media were not engaged in a concerted campaign to convince the public that Trump conspired with a foreign adversary to brainwash millions of African Americans into refusing to vote for Hillary Clinton with some emails and a handful of Facebook posts. No, the media were simply covering the story of his obstruction of the investigation of the made-up facts the intelligence agencies got them to relentlessly disseminate to generate the appearance of a story, which, once it was out there, had to be reported on, regardless of how it came into being, or whose nefarious purposes it served.

Moreover, regardless of whether Mueller did or did not establish obstruction (or attempted obstruction, which is just as impeachable) of his non-investigation of collusion, he absolutely established that Russia attacked us by brainwashing all those African Americans who were definitely going to vote for Clinton until they saw those divisive Facebook ads and those DNC emails that Putin personally ordered Trump to order Paul Manafort to personally deliver to Julian Assange, who was hunkered down in the Ecuadorean embassy poking holes in King-size condoms, abusing his cat, and smearing invisible poo all over the walls of his kitchen.

Now, these are all indisputable facts, which Mueller establishes in his report by referencing the repeated assertions of a consensus of U.S. intelligence agencies, and the corporate media’s relentless repetition of those agencies’ assertions, and the feeling a lot of people have that they must be factual to some extent, given how often they have been repeated, and referenced, and authoritatively asserted, and how familiar they sound when they hear them, again. The fact that there exists no evidence whatsoever of any “Russian attack,” and that all we’re actually talking about is the publication of a bunch of emails that DNC members actually wrote, and some ridiculous social media posts, should not in any way detract from the fact that the Russians launched a totally devastating, virtually Pearl Harbor-scale attack on the fabric of American democracy, which Trump obstructed an investigation of, or attempted to obstruct an investigation of, or conspired to attempt to obstruct an investigation of obstruction of.

Or whatever. The point is, now they’ve got him! His justice obstructing days are numbered! Break out the pussyhats and vuvuzelas, because next stop is Impeachment City! So what if he’s not a Russian agent and didn’t conspire or collude with anyone? He got elected without permission, and insulted a lot of powerful people, and … well, who cares what they impeach him for, as long as they impeach him for something!

They kind of have to, at this point, don’t they? They just spent most of the last three years rolling out an official narrative in which the Russians are running around attacking democracy, poisoning ducks with Novichok perfume, fomenting populist uprisings in France, and just generally being the evil enemies that the Islamic terrorists used to be, before they turned into freedom fighters and helped us try to take over Syria.

If the Democrats don’t impeach Donald Trump, that official narrative might fall apart. Liberals might have to face the fact that Americans elected Donald Trump president, not because they were brainwashed by Russians, or had any illusions about what a thuggish, self-aggrandizing buffoon he is, but because they were so disgusted with the neoliberal Washington establishment, and the global capitalist elites that own it, that they leapt at the chance to vote against it, and probably would have elected anyone who promised to even marginally disrupt it … but there I go drifting off into my crazy conspiracist thinking again.

Anyway … I’m really sorry about all that stuff I wrote about the corporate media. Rest assured, that won’t happen again. Admittedly, I blew the Russiagate thing, but I promise to do better with Obstructiongate, or Tax-Returngate, or Whatevergate. It doesn’t really matter what we call it, right? The important thing is to teach the masses what happens when they vote for unauthorized candidates. We’re only halfway through that lesson. Stay tuned … there’s much, much more to come!

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CJ Hopkins

April 25, 2019

[image error]DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Patreon page (where you can contribute as little $1 per month), or send your contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our staff up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian novel, Zone 23, which we understand is pretty gosh darn funny, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, please feel free to contact him directly.

Uncle Tom’s Empire

I don’t normally do this kind of thing, but, given the arrest of Julian Assange last week, and the awkward and cowardly responses thereto, I felt it necessary to abandon my customary literary standards and spew out a spineless, hypocritical “hot take” professing my concern about the dangerous precedent the U.S. government may be setting by extraditing and prosecuting a publisher for exposing American war crimes and such, while at the same time making it abundantly clear how much I personally loathe Assange, and consider him an enemy of America, and freedom, and want the authorities to crush him like a cockroach.

Now I want to be absolutely clear. I totally defend Assange and Wikileaks, and the principle of freedom of the press, and whatever. And I am all for exposing American war crimes (as long as it doesn’t endanger the lives of the Americans who committed those war crimes, or inconvenience them in any way). At the same time, while I totally support all that, I feel compelled to express my support together with my personal loathing of Assange, who, if all those important principles weren’t involved, I would want to see taken out and shot, or at least locked up in Super-Max solitary … not for any crime in particular, but just because I personally loathe him so much.

I’m not quite sure why I loathe Assange. I’ve never actually met the man. I just have this weird, amorphous feeling that he’s a horrible, disgusting, extremist person who is working for the Russians and is probably a Nazi. It feels kind of like that feeling I had, back in the Winter of 2003, that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons, which he was going to give to those Al Qaeda terrorists who were bayonetting little babies in their incubators, or the feeling I still have, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Trump is a Russian intelligence asset who peed on Barack Obama’s bed, and who is going to set fire to the Capitol building, declare himself American Hitler, and start rounding up and murdering the Jews.

I don’t know where these feelings come from. If you challenged me, I probably couldn’t really support them with any, like, actual facts or anything, at least not in any kind of rational way. Being an introspective sort of person, I do sometimes wonder if maybe my feelings are the result of all the propaganda and relentless psychological and emotional conditioning that the ruling classes and the corporate media have subjected me to since the day I was born, and that influential people in my social circle have repeated, over and over again, in such a manner as to make it clear that contradicting their views would be extremely unwelcome, and might negatively impact my social status, and my prospects for professional advancement.

Take my loathing of Assange, for example. I feel like I can’t even write a column condemning his arrest and extradition without gratuitously mocking or insulting the man. When I try to, I feel this sudden fear of being denounced as a “Trump-loving Putin-Nazi,” and a “Kremlin-sponsored rape apologist,” and unfriended by all my Facebook friends. Worse, I get this sickening feeling that unless I qualify my unqualified support for freedom of press, and transparency, and so on, with some sort of vicious, vindictive remark about the state of Assange’s body odor, and how he’s probably got cooties, or has pooped his pants, or some other childish and sadistic taunt, I can kiss any chance I might have had of getting published in a respectable publication goodbye.

But I’m probably just being paranoid, right? Distinguished, highbrow newspapers and magazines like The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Vox, Vice, Daily Mail, and others of that caliber, are not just propaganda organs whose primary purpose is to reinforce the official narratives of the ruling classes. No, they publish a broad range of opposing views. The Guardian, for example, just got Owen Jones to write a full-throated defense of Assange on that grounds that he’s probably a Nazi rapist who should be locked up in a Swedish prison, not in an American prison! The Guardian, remember, is the same publication that printed a completely fabricated story accusing Assange of secretly meeting with Paul Manafort and some alleged “Russians,” among a deluge of other such Russiagate nonsense, and that has been demonizing Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite for several years.

Plus, according to NPR’s Bob Garfield (who is lustfully “looking forward to Assange’s day in court”), and other liberal lexicologists, Julian Assange is not even a real journalist, so we have no choice but to mock and humiliate him, and accuse him of rape and espionage … oh, and speaking of which, did you hear the one about how his cat was spying on the Ecuadorean diplomats?

But seriously now, all joking aside, it’s always instructive (if a bit sickening) to watch as the mandarins of the corporate media disseminate an official narrative and millions of people robotically repeat it as if it were their own opinions. This process is particularly nauseating to watch when the narrative involves the stigmatization, delegitimization, and humiliation of an official enemy of the ruling classes. Typically, this enemy is a foreign enemy, like Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, Milošević, Osama bin Laden, Putin, or whoever. But sometimes the enemy is one of “us” … a traitor, a Judas, a quisling, a snitch, like Trump, Corbyn, or Julian Assange.

In either case, the primary function of the corporate media remains the same: to relentlessly assassinate the character of the “enemy,” and to whip the masses up into a mindless frenzy of hatred of him, like the Two-Minutes Hate in 1984, the Kill-the-Pig scene in Lord of the Flies, the scapegoating of Jews in Nazi Germany, and other examples a bit closer to home.

Logic, facts, and actual evidence have little to nothing to do with this process. The goal of the media and other propagandists is not to deceive or mislead the masses. Their goal is to evoke the pent-up rage and hatred simmering within the masses and channel it toward the official enemy. It is not necessary for the demonization of the official enemy to be remotely believable, or stand up to any kind of serious scrutiny. No one sincerely believes that Donald Trump is a Russian Intelligence asset, or that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite, or that Julian Assange has been arrested for jumping bail, or raping anyone, or for helping Chelsea Manning “hack” a password.

The demonization of the empire’s enemies is not a deception … it is a loyalty test. It is a ritual in which the masses (who, let’s face it, are de facto slaves) are ordered to display their fealty to their masters, and their hatred of their masters’ enemies. Cooperative slaves have plenty of pent-up hatred to unleash upon their masters’ enemies. They have all the pent-up hatred of their masters (which they do not dare direct at their masters, except within the limits their masters allow), and they have all the hatred of themselves for being cooperative, and … well, basically, cowards.

Julian Assange is being punished for defying the global capitalist empire. This was always going to happen, no matter who was in the White House. Anyone who defies the empire in such a flagrant manner is going to be punished. Cooperative slaves demand this of their masters. Defiant slaves are actually less of a threat to their masters than they are to the other slaves who have chosen to accept their slavery and cooperate with their own oppression. Their defiance shames these cooperative slaves, and shines an unflattering light on their cowardice.

This is why we are witnessing so many liberals (and liberals in leftist’s clothing) rushing to express their loathing of Assange in the same breath as they pretend to support him, not because they honestly believe the content of the official Julian Assange narrative that the ruling classes are disseminating, but because (a) they fear the consequences of not robotically repeating this narrative, and (b) Assange has committed the cardinal sin of reminding them that actual “resistance” to the global capitalist empire is possible, but only if you’re willing to pay the price.

Assange has been paying it for the last seven years, and is going to be paying it for the foreseeable future. Chelsea Manning is paying it again. The Gilets Jaunes protestors have been paying it in France. Malcolm X paid it. Sophie Scholl paid it. Many others throughout history have paid it. Cowards mocked them as they did, as they are mocking Julian Assange at the moment. That’s all right, though, after he’s been safely dead for ten or twenty years, they’ll name a few streets and high schools after him. Maybe they’ll even build him a monument.

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CJ Hopkins

April 15, 2019

[image error]DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Patreon page (where you can contribute as little $1 per month), or send your contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our staff up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian novel, Zone 23, which we understand is pretty gosh darn funny, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, please feel free to contact him directly.