C.J. Hopkins's Blog, page 17

Manufacturing Truth

If you’re one of the millions of human beings who, despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, still believe there is such a thing as “the truth,” you might not want to read this essay. Seriously, it can be extremely upsetting when you discover that there is no “truth” … or rather, that what we’re all conditioned to regard as “truth” from the time we are children is just the product of a technology of power, and not an empirical state of being. Humans, upon first encountering this fact, have been known to freak completely out and start jabbering about the “Word of God,” or “the immutable laws of quantum physics,” and run around burning other people at the stake or locking them up and injecting them with Thorazine. I don’t want to be responsible for anything like that, so consider this your trigger warning.

OK, now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a look at how “truth” is manufactured. It’s actually not that complicated. See, the “truth” is … well, it’s a story, essentially. It’s whatever story we are telling ourselves at any given point in history (“we” being the majority of people, those conforming to the rules of whatever system wields enough power to dictate the story it wants everyone to be telling themselves). Everyone understands this intuitively, but the majority of people pretend they don’t in order to be able to get by in the system, which punishes anyone who does not conform to its rules, or who contradicts its story. So, basically, to manufacture the truth, all you really need is (a) a story, and (b) enough power to coerce a majority of people in your society to pretend to believe it.

I’ll return to this point a little later. First, let’s look at a concrete example of our system manufacturing “truth.” I’m going to use The Guardian‘s most recent blatantly fabricated article (“Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy“) as an example, but I could just as well have chosen any of a host of other fabricated stories disseminated by “respectable” outlets over the course of the last two years. The “Russian Propaganda Peddlers” story. The “Russia Might Have Poisoned Hillary Clinton” story. The “Russians Hacked the Vermont Power Grid” story. The “Golden Showers Russian Pee-Tape” story. The “” story. The “Bana Alabed Speaks Out” story. The “Trump’s Secret Russian Server” story. The “Labour Anti-Semitism Crisis” story. The “Russians Orchestrated Brexit” story. The “Russia is Going to Hack the Midterms” story. The “Twitter Bots” story. And the list goes on.

I’m not going to debunk the Guardian article here. It has been debunked by better debunkers than I (e.g., Jonathan Cook, Craig Murray, Glenn Greenwald, Moon of Alabama, and many others). The short version is, The Guardian‘s Luke Harding, a shameless hack who will affix his name to any propaganda an intelligence agency feeds him, alleged that Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, secretly met with Julian Assange (and unnamed “Russians”) on numerous occasions from 2013 to 2016, presumably to conspire to collude to brainwash Americans into not voting for Clinton. Harding’s earth-shaking allegations, which The Guardian prominently featured and flogged, were based on … well, absolutely nothing, except the usual anonymous “intelligence sources.” After actual journalists pointed this out, The Guardian quietly revised the piece (employing the subjunctive mood rather liberally), buried it in the back pages of its website, and otherwise pretended like they had never published it.

By that time, of course, its purpose had been served. The story had been picked up and disseminated by other “respectable,” “authoritative” outlets, and it was making the rounds on social media. Nonetheless, out of an abundance of caution, in an attempt to counter the above-mentioned debunkers (and dispel the doubts of anyone else still capable of any kind of critical thinking), Politico posted this ass-covering piece speculating that, if it somehow turned out The Guardian‘s story was just propaganda designed to tarnish Assange and Trump … well, probably, it had been planted by the Russians to make Luke Harding look like a moron. This ass-covering piece of speculative fiction, which was written by a former CIA agent, was immediately disseminated by liberals and “leftists” who are eagerly looking forward to the arrest, rendition, and public crucifixion of Assange.

At this point, I imagine you’re probably wondering what this has to do with manufacturing “truth.” Because, clearly, this Guardian story was a lie … a lie The Guardian got caught telling. I wish the “truth” thing was as simple as that (i.e., exposing and debunking the ruling classes’ lies). Unfortunately, it isn’t. Here is why.

Much as most people would like there to be one (and behave and speak as if there were one), there is no Transcendental Arbiter of Truth. The truth is what whoever has the power to say it is says it is. If we do not agree that that “truth” is the truth, there is no higher court to appeal to. We can argue until we are blue in the face. It will not make the slightest difference. No evidence we produce will make the slightest difference. The truth will remain whatever those with the power to say it is say it is.

Nor are there many truths (i.e., your truth and my truth). There is only one truth … the official truth. The truth according to those in power. This is the whole purpose of the concept of truth. It is the reason the concept of “truth” was invented (i.e., to render any other “truths” lies). It is how those in power control reality and impose their ideology on the masses (or their employees, or their students, or their children). Yes, I know, we very badly want there to be some “objective truth” (i.e., what actually happened, when whatever happened, JFK, 9-11, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Schrödinger’s dead cat, the Big Bang, or whatever). There isn’t. The truth is just a story … a story that is never our story.

The truth is a story that power gets to tell, and that the powerless do not get to tell, unless they tell the story of those in power, which is always someone else’s story. The powerless are either servants of power or they are heretics. There is no third alternative. They either parrot the truth of the ruling classes or they utter heresies of one type or another. Naturally, the powerless do not regard themselves as heretics. They do not regard their “truth” as heresy. They regard their “truth” as the truth, which is heresy. The truth of the powerless is always heresy.

For example, while it may be personally comforting for some of us to tell ourselves that we know the truth about certain subjects (e.g., Russiagate, 9-11, et cetera), and to share our knowledge with others who agree with us, and even to expose the lies of the corporate media on Twitter, Facebook, and our blogs, or in some leftist webzine (or “fearless adversarial” outlet bankrolled by a beneficent oligarch), the ruling classes do not give a shit, because ours is merely the raving of heretics, and does not warrant a serious response.

Or … all right, they give a bit of a shit, enough to try to cover their asses when a journalist of the stature of Glenn Greenwald (who won a Pulitzer and is frequently on television) very carefully and very respectfully almost directly accuses them of lying. But they give enough of a shit to do this because Greenwald has the power to hurt them, not because of any regard for the truth. This is also why Greenwald has to be so careful and respectful when directly confronting The Guardian, or any other corporate media outlet, and state that their blatantly fabricated stories could, theoretically, turn out to be true. He can’t afford to cross the line and end up getting branded a heretic and consigned to Outer Mainstream Darkness, like Robert Fisk, Sy Hersh, Jonathan Cook, John Pilger, Assange, and other such heretics.

Look, I’m not trying to argue that it isn’t important to expose the fabrications of the corporate media and the ruling classes. It is terribly important. It is mostly what I do (albeit usually in a more satirical fashion). At the same time, it is important to realize that “the truth” is not going to “rouse the masses from their slumber” and inspire them to throw off their chains. People are not going to suddenly “wake up,” “see the truth” and start “the revolution.” People already know the truth … the official truth, which is the only truth there is. Those who are conforming to it are doing so, not because they are deceived, but because it is safer and more rewarding to do so.

And this is why The Guardian will not be punished for publishing a blatantly fabricated story. Nor will Luke Harding be penalized for writing it. Luke Harding will be rewarded for writing it, as he has been handsomely rewarded throughout his career for loyally serving the ruling classes. Greenwald, on the other hand, is on thin ice. It will be instructive to see how far he pushes his confrontation with The Guardian regarding this story.

As for Julian Assange, I’m afraid he is done for. The ruling classes really have no choice but to go ahead and do him at this point. He hasn’t left them any other option. Much as they are loathe to create another martyr, they can’t have heretics of Assange’s notoriety running around punching holes in their “truth” and brazenly defying their authority. That kind of stuff unsettles the normals, and it sets a bad example for the rest of us heretics.

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CJ Hopkins

December 3, 2018

[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.

Beware the Trumpenleft!

Unless you move in certain leftist circles, you may not have heard about one of the Russians’ most insidiously evil active measures, an active measure so insidiously evil that it could only have been dreamed up in Moscow, the current wellspring of insidious evil. Its official Russo-Nazi-sounding code name is still being decided on by leftist cryptographers, but most people know it as the “Trumpenleft.”

The Trumpenleft (or “Sputnik Left,” as it is also called by professional anti-Putin-Nazi intelligence analysts) is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It is a gang of nefarious Putin-Nazi infiltrators posing as respectable leftists in order to disseminate Trumpian ideology and Putin-Nazi propaganda among an assortment of online leftist magazines that hardly anyone ever actually reads. The aim of these insidious Trumpenleft infiltrators is to sow confusion, chaos, and discord among actual, real, authentic leftists who are going about the serious business of calling Donald Trump a fascist on the Internet twenty-five times a day, verbally abusing Julian Assange, occasionally pulling down oppressive statues, and sharing videos of racist idiots acting like racist idiots in public.

The Trumpenleft is determined to sabotage (or momentarily disrupt) this revolutionary work, mostly by tricking these actual leftists into critically thinking about a host of issues that there is no good reason to critically think about … global capitalism, national sovereignty, immigration, identity politics, corporate censorship, and other issues that there is no conceivable reason to discuss, or debate, or even casually mention, unless you’re some kind of Russia-loving Nazi.

Angela Nagle’s recent piece in American Affairs is a perfect example. Nagle (who is certainly Trumpenleft) puts forth the fascistic proposition that mass migration won’t help the world’s poor, and she claims that it creates “a race to the bottom for workers” in wealthier, developed countries and “a brain drain” in poorer, less developed countries. After deploying a variety of Trumpenleft sophistry (i.e., fact-based analysis, logic, and so on), she goes so far as to openly suggest that “progressives should focus on addressing the systemic exploitation at the root of mass migration rather than retreating to a shallow moralism” … a shallow moralism that reifies the dominant neoliberal ideology that is causing mass migration in the first place.

This is the type of gobbledegook the Trumpenleft use to try to dupe real leftists into putting down their phones for a minute and actually thinking through political issues! Fortunately, no one is falling for it. As any bona fide leftist knows, there is no “mass migration problem.” The whole thing is simply a racist hoax concocted by Putin, Alex Jones, and other Trumpian disinformationists. The only thing real leftists need to know about immigration is that immigrants are good, and Trump, and walls, and borders are bad! All that other fancy gibberish about global capitalism, Milton Friedman, labor markets, and national sovereignty is nothing but fascist propaganda (which needs to be censored, or at least deplatformed, or demonetized, or otherwise suppressed).

But Angela Nagle is just one example. The Trumpenleft is legion, and growing. Its membership includes a handful of prominent (and rather less prominent) fake leftist figures: Glenn Greenwald, who many among the “Resistance” would like to see renditioned and indefinitely detained in some offshore Trumpenleft gulag somewhere; Matt Taibbi, who just published a treasonous article challenging the right of the US government to prosecute publishers as “enemy agents” for publishing material they don’t want published; Julian Assange, who is one such publisher, and who the US has scheduled for public crucifixion just as soon as they can get their hands on him; Aaron Maté of the Real News Network, a notorious Trump-Russia “collusion denialist“; Caitlin Johnstone, an Australian blogger and poet who the Red-Brown Putin-Nazi hunters at CounterPunch have become totally obsessed with; Diana Johnstone, who they also don’t like; and (full disclosure) your humble narrator.

Now, normally, the opinions of some political journalists and rather marginal political writers wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, but there’s a war on, so there’s no room for neutrality. As I mentioned in my latest essay, over the course of the next two years, the global capitalist ruling classes need to make an example of Trump, and Assange, and anyone else who has had the gall to fuck with their global empire. Part of how they are going to do this is to further polarize the already extremely polarized ideological spectrum until everyone is forced onto one or the other side of a pro- or anti-Trump equation, or a pro- or anti-populist equation … or a pro- or anti-fascist equation.

As you probably noticed, The Guardian has just launched a special six-week “investigative series” exploring the whole “new populism” phenomenon (which began with a lot of scary photos of Steve Bannon next to the word “populism”). We are going to be hearing a lot about “populism” over the course of the next two years. We are going to be hearing how “populism” is actually not that different from fascism, or at the very least is inherently racist, and anti-Semitic, and xenophobic, and how, basically, anyone who criticizes neoliberal elites or the corporate media is Russia-loving, pro-Trump Nazi.

And this is where this “Trumpenleft” malarkey fits into the ruling classes’ broader campaign to eliminate any kind of critical thinking and force people to mindlessly root for their “team.” See, the problem with us “Trumpenleft” types is not that we support Donald Trump. For the record, none of us really do. Some of us think he us a dangerous demagogue. Others of us think he is a blithering idiot. None of us think he’s Fidel Castro, or that he cares one iota about the working classes, or about anyone other than Donald Trump.

No, the problem is not that we’re on the wrong team; the problem is that we are asking people to question the propaganda of the team that we’re supposed to be on, or at least be rooting for. We are asking people to pay attention to how the global capitalist ruling establishment is going about quashing this “populist” insurgency (of which Brexit and Trump are manifestations, not causes) so they can get back to the business of relentlessly restructuring, privatizing, and debt-enslaving everything, as they’ve been doing since the end of the Cold War. We’re asking folks, not to join “the other team,” but to pay close attention to how they are being manipulated into believing that there are only two “teams,” and that they have to join one, and then mindlessly parrot whatever nonsense their team decides they need to disseminate in order to win a game that is merely a simulation they have conjured up (i.e., the ruling classes have conjured up) in order to inoculate themselves against an actual conflict they cannot win and so must prevent at all costs from ever beginning … which, they are doing a pretty good job of that so far.

In other words, the problem with us Trumpenlefters is, the prospect of defeating a fake Russian Hitler, and restoring neoliberal normality in the USA and the rest of the West, is just not all that terribly inspiring. So, rather than regurgitating the Russia hysteria and the fascism hysteria that is being produced by the global capitalist ruling establishment to gin up support for their counterinsurgency, we are continuing to focus on the capitalist ruling classes, which are actually still running things, globally, and will be running things long after Trump is gone (and the Imminent Threat of Global Fascist Takeover of Everything has disappeared, as the Imminent Threat of Nookular Terrorist Backpack Attack disappeared before it).

Or maybe all that is just a ruse, an attempt on my part to dupe you into going out and buying a MAGA hat and shouting racist abuse at Honduran kids, assuming you can find some in your vicinity. You never know with us Trumpenleft types. Probably the safest thing to do to protect yourself from our insidious treachery is to start your own personal Trumpenleft blacklist, and spread lies about us all over the Internet, or just report us to Twitter, or Facebook, or somebody, whoever you feel are the proper authorities. The main thing is to shut us up, or prophylactically delegitimize us, to keep us from infecting other leftists with our filthy, nonconformist ideas. The last thing we need at a time like this is a bunch of leftists thinking for themselves and questioning official leftist dogma. Who knows what that kind of behavior might lead to?

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N.B. As far as I could gather from my research, the “Trumpenleft” label was coined by Paul Street, a regular columnist at Truthdig and CounterPunch and all-around professional leftist. Like the editors of The New York Times, Street understands the importance of sloppily Germanicizing terms you want to frighten people with, because there’s nothing quite as terrifying as Nazi morphology!

CJ Hopkins

November 26, 2018

Photo: Jordán Francisco/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

[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 Hitlergate Hearings

OK, so, that was a close one. For a moment there, I was starting to worry that the Democrats weren’t going to take back the House and rescue us from “the brink of fascism.” Which, if that had happened, in addition to having to attend all those horrible stadium rallies and help the government mass murder the Jews, we would have been denied the next two years of Donald Trump-related congressional hearings and investigations that we can now look forward to … I’m going to go ahead and call them the Hitlergate Hearings.

Staging these hearings has always been a crucial  part of the Resistance’s strategy. As history has proved, time and time again, when literal fascists take over your democracy, outlaw opposing political parties, and start shipping people off to concentration camps and revoking journalists’ White House access, the only effective way to defeat them is to form a whole buttload of congressional committees and investigate the living Hitler out of them. This is especially the case when the literal fascists who have commandeered your democracy are conspiring with a shifty-eyed Slavic dictator whose country you have essentially surrounded with your full-spectrum dominant military forces, and who your media have thoroughly demonized, but who is nevertheless able to brainwash your citizens into electing his fascist puppet president with a few thousand dollars worth of Facebook ads.

Once you’ve determined that has happened (which it obviously has), the gloves have to come off. No more prancing around in pussyhats, not with Russian Hitler in office! No, at that point, you really have no choice but to wait two years until your opposition party (which Hitler somehow forgot to ban) regains control of the House of Representatives (which Hitler somehow forgot to dissolve), wait another two months until they take office, and then immediately start issuing subpoenas, auditing Hitler’s financial records, and taking affidavits from former hookers. I realize that may sound extreme, but remember, we’re talking literal fascists, backed by literal Russian fascists, who are going around emboldening literal fascism, and making literal fascist hand gestures on television, and doing all kinds of other fascist stuff!

Now, OK, if you’re anything like me, you’re probably wondering, if Trump is really a fascist, not to mention a Russian intelligence asset, why hasn’t the “Resistance” just assassinated him? Many of them are ex-CIA, after all, or are otherwise members of the Intelligence Community. Why bother with all these congressional hearings? Why not just go in there and kill him?

Well, the problem with that apparently is, they have to follow “the rule of law,” which prevents them from just assassinating people, and “regime-changing” governments that are not playing ball, and, you know, staging military coups, arming and training sadistic death squads, and sanctioning thousands of children to death. That kind of stuff is not just wrong, like, morally, or whatever, it is also illegal. So, even though a Russian agent, who is also literally Adolf Hitler, stole the election from Hillary Clinton, and is remaking America into a fascist dictatorship, the only recourse the “Resistance” has is to mount these congressional investigations and publicize them in excruciating detail until November 3, 2020, at which point all this “Fascism” hysteria will just disappear into the ether like the “War on Terror” hysteria did the moment Trump won the nomination.

But that’s two years from now, which is almost an eternity. In the meantime, the neoliberal “Resistance” has got some serious investigating to do! And not just Mueller’s investigation of Trump’s treasonous activities as a Russian agent. No, we’re talking congressional investigations of his tax returns, his Deutsche Bank statements, takeout receipts, dry cleaning tickets, his entire fascistic financial history! And then there’s that emoluments thing! And that Kavanaugh thing! And that security clearance thing! And that bimbo thing! And some other things! And, well, I think it’s pretty safe to assume we are on the road to Subpoena City!

The corporate media appear to agree. Scanning the post-election coverage, it looked like most “Resistance” journalists got the official press release. The Guardian started taking live bets on which investigations the House would launch first. The New York Times, in its ongoing efforts to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller from the fascistic “muzzling” its editorial staff are certain that Trump is about to subject him to in order to prevent him from presenting evidence of Trump’s formative years in the GRU (and possible links to the Skripal assassins), published a “roadmap” Mueller can follow to “send incriminating evidence directly to Congress,” bypassing the Nazified Justice Department! According to CNN (a dissident samizdat owned by the Turner Broadcasting division of Warner Media, LLC, which, in turn, is owned by AT&T, a multinational conglomerate holding company), “House Democrats are preparing to unleash the full force of their oversight powers on the Trump administration” in series of “high-octane Democratic-controlled hearings,” which Jim Acosta will be covering live, if he has to take out every jackbooted Nazi intern on the Hill to do it! I could go on, but you get the picture. And for anyone who doesn’t, here it is …

The next two years will be a demonstration of the power of the global capitalist empire and its predominant propaganda machine the likes of which the world has never witnessed. By November 3, 2020, they will need to have brainwashed enough Americans into voting for whatever global capitalist puppet the Democrats end up nominating to defeat Donald Trump in the general election, which isn’t going to be a cakewalk. To do this, they will need to foment such an atmosphere of mindless hysteria, emotional exhaustion, and paranoia that anyone to the left of Mussolini will stagger to the polls on election day and vote for the Democrat just to make it stop.

In addition to the Hitlergate Hearings, each and every excruciating moment of which will be broadcast live and then milked to death by the corporate media’s experts and pundits, they will continue to subject us to a torrent of messaging designed to convince us that Donald Trump is simultaneously Hitler and a Russian operative, and that America is literally “on the brink of fascism,” and that anyone who questions this narrative is a Putin-loving Trumpian fascist, and a hate criminal, and probably a “domestic terrorist.”

None of this messaging will need to make sense. The goal of the “Resistance” is not to present a credible case that Donald Trump is literally a fascist or a Russian operative, or that global capitalism is in any real danger of being torn asunder by literal fascism (whatever your definition of fascism is). The goal of the “Resistance” is to make it unmistakeably clear who is really running things, and what happens to annoying billionaire ass clowns who get elected president without their permission, and to the ignorant rabble who elect such ass clowns, or who vote to leave the European Union (which, of course, they will never allow to happen, except perhaps in some nominal sense).

In other words, the global capitalist ruling classes are about to teach the world a lesson. It is the same basic lesson they have been teaching the world since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. They taught it in the former Yugoslavia. They taught it in Greece, and Iraq, and Libya. They have taught it throughout the Middle East. They are about to teach it throughout the West. The lesson is, resistance to global capitalism is not just futile, it is suicidal. The lesson is, play with identity politics and all that “cultural wars” stuff to your heart’s content, but fuck with global capitalism and we will squash you like a tomato bug.

The Hitlergate Hearings, the fascism hysteria, the Russian mind control paranoia, and the rest of the concerted propaganda campaign we have been subjected to since 2016 (and are about to experience the full force of) are all just parts of a broader effort, not just to crush the “populist” insurgency that began in the West with the Brexit referendum, continued with Trump, and then spread throughout Europe, but to crush all hope for any future rebellions against global capitalism and its ideology, regardless of whether they stem from the Left or Right. (If you think they’re just focused on the neo-nationalists, you obviously haven’t been paying attention to the ongoing demonization of Corbyn, Mélenchon, Sahra Wagenknecht, and assorted other “populist” leftists.) In the old days, this was the part where the king would mount the usurper’s head on a spike to remind everybody who was boss. Nowadays, of course, we do it on television, or the Internet, like when we hung Saddam, or sodomized Gaddafi with a bayonet. They’re not going to do anything like that to Trump, who is, after all, an American usurper, but they are going to make an example of him.

So, get out your popcorn, and your pitchforks, and so on, and get ready to cheer them on as they do. The future of democracy hangs in the balance! And, if you’re on the Twitter, make sure you fulfill your daily Calling-Trump-a-Fascist and Feeding-the-Fascism-Hysteria quotas. And Putin, of course. Don’t forget Putin … and whatever other mindless hysteria the capitalist ruling classes need us to parrot. Trust me, in about two years, when the post-Putin-Nazi celebrations begin, and people are running around in the streets burning effigies, hooting vuvuzelas, and hunting down anyone wearing the wrong hat, you’re not going to want to be mistaken for having been on the “populist” side of history.

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CJ Hopkins

November 19, 2018

Photo: MLH Radio

[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.

KILL CHAIN LIVE! on Channel 16

In light of the Veteran’s Day holiday in America, and the fact that our annoying in-house satirist CJ Hopkins hasn’t sent us a column, we are pleased to publish the following chapter from his dystopian science fiction novel, Zone 23. It’s an entire chapter, so it is rather long, but we thought it might be comforting to read a vision of the future where the horrors of war have been relegated to the ash heap of history … or to the ash heap of aetheticization, or pathologization, or the ash heap of something. Here it is without further ado …

 

Chapter 12 – Billy Jensen

Six months and a few days later, Billy Jensen, who lived somewhere else, and who had never even heard of Taylor Byrd, or Valentina Constance Briggs, or any of the other people in our story, was … well, basically, he was watching TV. He was doing this on the JumboMax screen of his Tannhäuser Systems In-Home Viewer, a Model 60, Series K, which covered one entire wall of his studio. The Model 60, which he’d bought on credit, and owed about GD 400,000 on, was patched into his Tannhäuser Systems In-Home Professional Gaming Console, which resembled the cockpit of a military aircraft and took up most of the rest of his apartment.

Serious gamers like Billy Jensen didn’t mess around when it came to their Viewers, or their In-Home Professional Gaming Consoles. They shelled out for the seriously high-end Pro-stuff, which was optimized to support whatever professional-quality gaming platforms the company in question designed and marketed, or had the exclusive rights to distribute, or some other kind of lucrative deal. Tannhäuser Systems (a partly-owned subsidiary of another subsidiary of another subsidiary of the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin), in addition to being the market leader in the seriously high-end Viewer market, and Professional Gaming Console market, and offering an extensive and affordable line of professional quality gaming accessories, and T-shirts, and caps, and branded coffee mugs, was also the maker of the wildly popular interactive simulated MercyKill game, KILL CHAIN, which was Billy Jensen’s game.

KILL CHAIN, despite its aggressive-sounding name, was nothing at all like the horribly violent Anti-Social first-person shooter games people used to play in the bad old days. The violence involved was in no way gratuitous; it was strictly clinical, and compassion-based. The Targets were all Class 4 Anti-Socials, who were needlessly suffering late-stage disease, and whose quality of life was non-existent when measured on the HRQOL scale. Most of them were dangerous faith-based Terrorists, who posed potentially devastating threats, possibly with improvised nuclear devices, or horrible chemical or biological agents that would kill you the second they touched your skin. KILL CHAIN players (or Operators) targeted these poor lost souls remotely, neutralizing any threat they posed, and putting them out of their pointless misery.

KILL CHAIN VIII: Compassionate Hammer, released online the previous December, just in time for the Christmas holidays, was, in Billy Jensen’s opinion, one of the best in the KILL CHAIN series. It was sitting there, loaded, in his gaming console, ready to go when he logged off work. KILL CHAIN VII: For Their Own Good had been a serious disappointment. Too much focus had been placed on the Targets, on their personal lives and medical histories, had been the general critical consensus. Billy Jensen had to agree. It felt like maybe the narrative talent had gotten a little carried away with themselves, building in all these endless layers of exposition, mood, and whatever. It was like they wanted you to work your way through some interminable rambling Russian novel (or some academic sociological text) before you could even sight the Targets, much less put a missile down on them. You sat there, stick in hand, for hours, watching them unnecessarily suffering … which all right, granted, definitely got you all pent-up and, like, itching to tag them, which of course when you did, after all that build-up, certainly heightened the sensation of the kill, which was obviously what the designers were going for, but it left you with this weird kind of empty feeling, which after a while got rather tiresome. KILL CHAIN VIII: Compassionate Hammer had cut way down on patterning time. All that boring background stuff had been relegated to a single window that displayed down in the corner of your screen. Average acquisition-to-action time (or “ATA time”) was under an hour. Veteran players, like Billy Jensen, could get a perfectly decent kill in during their lunch or dinner breaks, which Billy Jensen often did.

Billy Jensen was a Junior Online Customer Service Solutions Specialist. He was twenty-seven years old … a Clear. He worked for a firm called Kierkegaard/Bose, designers of some kind of software solutions that had something to do with needs of business that Billy Jensen did not understand. This wasn’t because he was unintelligent. Billy Jensen was extremely intelligent. He could have understood. He just didn’t care to. It wasn’t Billy’s job to understand. Billy’s job was to virtually chat with K/B’s transterritorial clients, trouble-shoot their myriad problems according to a detailed algorithmic script, and get them off the Live-Chat network in less than seven to eight minutes, ideally. Like most OCS reps, he did this from home (a totally modern single’s unit on the 98th floor of TransCom Towers in Northwest Region 228) while logged into K/B’s global network, which auto-monitored Billy’s keystrokes. Billy worked the lobster shift, from 2300 to 0700, which didn’t bother Billy one bit. He kept to a relatively rigid schedule, which aside from doing his OCS job primarily consisted of playing KILL CHAIN six days a week for up to six hours a day. He logged in as soon as he logged off work, and played until just after 1500, after which he worked out, ate, slept a few hours, got up, showered, ate a light breakfast, viewed some Content, and logged back onto the K/B network.

The Content Billy normally viewed while drinking his vitamin-supplemented, high-protein, micronized-glutamine breakfast was KILL CHAIN LIVE! on Channel 16, hosted by Dr. Roger P. Greenway and Susan Schnupftuch-Boermann Goereszky. And thus, it being a normal day, and the time being circa 2150, this was exactly what Billy was doing. The screen of his Tannhäuser Model 60 was running the standard Real-Time feed of what appeared to be a Quarantine Zone, shot from the nose of a UAV holding at an altitude of twenty-three kilometers. Crosshairs were sweeping a four-block grid of empty streets of unlit buildings. They looked like maybe former warehouses, nothing particularly fascinating.

“Any idea where we are now, Roger?”

“Susan, we’re looking at Zone 18, Southeast Region 423. Looks like a sultry night down there. Not much to see at the moment, I’m afraid.”

“It does look pretty desolate, Roger.”

“Like I said, Susan, hot one down there.”

“Shall we introduce Target Number One then, Roger?”

“Susan, looks like Target Number One is a subject name of Carlos Witherspoon. Designated Class 4 Anti-Social Person. Late stage disease. History of violence. Hiding in one of those buildings there, Susan.”

“Any idea which building, Roger?”

“No, apparently not, Susan. We seem to be standing by at the moment.”

An unflattering photograph of Carlos Witherspoon, bug-eyed, grimacing, needing a shave, appeared in the lower left corner of the screen.

“Here’s a photo of Witherspoon, Susan.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. Obviously in pain.”

“Breaks your heart to see them like that.”

“Yes, it certainly does, Susan.”

“No way to hide that kind of suffering.”

“Hopefully, we can get him some relief tonight.”

Billy Jensen hoped they could too. He disliked watching anything suffer, any form of sentient being, even a dangerous faith-based Terrorist. Being a Clear, he could not help this. Compassion was coded into his genes. His heart went out to Carlos Witherspoon, and all the other Carlos Witherspoons out there, suffering their needless pain and suffering. He meticulously peeled the foil away from his Happy Henry’s low-glycemic gluten-free instant energy bar and tried to imagine their pain and suffering. He couldn’t, or not entirely anyway. The desperate and unfocused rage, the hatred and envy of everything normal, and above all else the unrelenting fear that ruled their existence and governed all their actions, were emotions Billy had never felt, and thus could never completely conceive of, except in some purely intellectual way. The Variant-Positives were challenging enough, with their inner conflicts, and doubts, and questions, and their constant struggle to stay detached. Billy’s heart went out to them too, more so even, as he understood them, and how they thought, and he felt their pain. They wanted to be healthy, the Variant-Positives. They never would be, but they tried their best. The medications they took were crude, but they did seem to slow their disease progression, or at least reduced the worst of their symptoms to something approaching manageable levels. The drugs, however, could never stop them forming their Anti-Social ideations, or clear away the fog of primitive drives and base emotions that shrouded their brains. As uncorrected Homo sapiens sapiens, the best they could do was attempt to maintain a constant state of hypervigilance (i.e. paying close attention to their thoughts and feelings, writing them down, analyzing them, and then verbalizing them to “make them real.”) They did this in their support group meetings, and with friends, family, colleagues and doctors, and whoever was sitting beside them on the train, soliciting feedback from all and sundry, which they then evaluated and processed with others, who gave them feedback on this feedback, which brought up other thoughts and feelings, which they diligently processed, analyzed and verbalized, and meditated on at considerable length. All of which left them totally exhausted and no longer certain what they were feeling, or thinking, or exactly what they wanted, or what they had just been talking about. Billy’s Variant-Positive parents, Woody and Carmen, were perfect examples. They could hardly get through a conversation without stumbling over some thought or emotion that triggered some anxious observation of some possibly symptomatic reaction that they needed to process, accept and detach from, and otherwise discuss at considerable length. Billy loved his parents deeply, and he empathized with their pain, of course, but he couldn’t help feeling they would both be so much happier once they had reincarnated … whatever, Billy reasoned, chewing, in another hundred years or so the endless trials and tribulations of the Variant-Positives would all be over. In the meantime, they had done as much as any defective strain could do. They had tackled the problem (Anti-Social Disease) in a rational and scientific manner. To use a systems-based trouble-shooting analogy, which Billy did whenever possible, they had tracked and found their system error (the aberrant variant of the MAO-A gene), effected repairs to what they could (medicated the Variant-Positives), effectively quarantined what they couldn’t (segregated the A.S.P.s), and taken appropriate long-term steps to eliminate any future recurrence (developed the variant correction technologies, which had produced the Clarions, like Billy Jensen). All of which steps were perfectly logical, and thus, to Billy, complete no-brainers. However, he reflected, swallowing, for the Variant-Positives in charge at the time, these must have been rather difficult decisions, entailing as they did the making redundant, or phasing out, of their entire subspecies. Cognitively challenged as they were, he had to admire those Variant-Positives, those of his parents’ generation, who had made those decisions and who were trying their best to ensure a smooth and peaceful transition to a healthier world they would have no part in.

The A.S.P.s were a different matter. The poor things didn’t even know they were sick. Their brains were so gone, so riddled with disease, that they actually believed that they were normal, and that the Variant-Positives and Clears were the freaks. Which one good look in the mirror should have told them was not just wrong, but completely ridiculous. All right, sure, there were exceptions, but overwhelmingly, the Anti-Socials were simply … well, unattractive. They looked unhealthy, and congenitally so. And this was true of even the least afflicted and most cooperative among them, the ones they allowed outside the Zones to work in the Residential Communities, who Billy sometimes saw in passing on his way to Finkles or Big Buy Basement. The ones they didn’t let out were worse. Their skin was terrible, either dry and cracked or overly oily, and probably stank. Their hair was all greasy, clumped and matted, or it was powdered with dandruff and crawling with lice. Most of them seemed to be missing teeth, which was certainly caused by periodontitis. They bathed infrequently, clearly never flossed, didn’t use condoms, and smoked tobacco. Something like sixty percent, it was said, were chronic Diplastomorphinol users. The rest were mostly alcoholics, or were killing themselves in some other fashion. Billy could not begin to fathom what went through their small, enfeebled minds. How they went on, what they lived for, why they didn’t just euthanize themselves, were questions he had never been able to answer. Still, despite his instinctual revulsion (which any healthy organism felt when confronted with some grotesque abnormality among the members of its potential gene pool), he was, above all else, a Clear … so whenever he saw their photos appear on the screen of his Viewer on KILL CHAIN LIVE!, or even when he was just playing KILL CHAIN, and was confronted with their unrelenting pain, and pointless physical and emotional suffering, he felt himself overcome with compassion, and not just for the Target at hand, but for every living, needlessly suffering, uncorrected sentient being … that, and an irresistible urge to take them out as quickly as possible.

KILL CHAIN LIVE! on Channel 16, had been on the air for some twenty-five years. It ran at 2300 nightly, except for Sundays and major holidays. Billy Jensen had been watching the show, religiously, since the age of twelve, which technically his parents should have prevented, but nobody ever checked that stuff. The production elements had changed through the years as styles went in and out of fashion and new technologies came online, but the basic premise remained the same. Targets posing imminent threats, usually in some Recovering Area, but occasionally in one of the Quarantine Zones, were acquired, locked on, and eventually taken, typically by a laser-guided AGM 660 Godsend missile, the classic air-to-surface munition manufactured by Pfizer-Lockheed, which was one of the major sponsors of the show. The 660 Godsend, a solid fuel rocket, equipped with either a standard condensed or an “indoor” thermobaric warhead, and a Semi-Active Laser Homing guidance system that was totally unrivaled, was the ordnance of choice of Security Services throughout the United Territories. Not only was the Godsend a first class weapon suitable for use in both open and urban Emergency Threat Containment environments, but by licensing the use of its in-flight footage to KILL CHAIN LIVE! on Channel 16, Security Divisions of leading corporations, like the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin, were doubling and tripling their profit margins. Hi-Def Real-Time NoseCam feed provided PixelPerfect footage of the Godsend’s dizzying Mach 2 descent through diaphanous webs of fluffy white clouds like some monomaniacal avenging angel. Average flight time was 26 seconds, during which the Operator needed to hold the crosshairs steady, painting the target, which was often moving, for the Godsend’s onboard laser seeker. The last few seconds were always a blur, so you had to wait for the slow-mo replays and satellite footage from other angles to see all the details and determine the score. For the overwhelming majority of Targets, death was instant, and presumably painless, unless a Target was exceptionally good, or whoever was manning the UAV screwed up somehow, or something malfunctioned. Normally, the Targets, whoever they were, males mostly, but sometimes females, and sometimes groups, or “hives” as they called them, were vaporized never knowing what hit them. Before the strikes you’d get their backgrounds, names, photos, medical histories, ages, associates, whatever there was. Then came a ten-minute call-in segment, when they read out people’s Fleeps and Tweaks, followed by some kind of medical expert, who Billy Jensen generally ignored. The current hosts, Dr. Roger P. Greenway and Susan Schnupftuch-Boermann Goereszky, were fairly attractive Variant-Positives whose job it was to look “concerned” or “deeply interested” or “wildly excited” while talking into the camera continuously as other people talked in their ears, telling them what to do and say.

“Susan, I think we’re getting the yellow.”

“I’ve got that here as well, Roger.”

Susan Schnupftuch-Boermann Goereszky, who sometimes did the news on Sundays, was “live” at her desk on the KILL CHAIN LIVE! set, a technological phantasmagoria officially located in Studio B of the Channel 16 Broadcast Center. Dr. Greenway was hunkered down in an undisclosed secure location, probably somewhere down the hall, surrounded by screens and wires and panels of buttons that nobody knew what they did.

“Susan, we’re definitely yellow here, Susan.”

“Still no sign of Witherspoon, Roger?”

“Nothing yet. But there must be something, or we wouldn’t be getting the yellow, Susan.”

“Roger, we’re going yellow in the studio.”

The infinity cycs in Studio B faded slowly from orange to yellow. Susan Schnupftuch-Boermann Goereszky cleared her throat and adjusted her posture. An ad for Anabastastic Plus, a painless anal bleaching compound, popped up right in the middle of the screen, which didn’t have anything to do with anything, so Billy minimized and stacked it with the others.

“Susan, it feels like something’s happening.”

“Is something happening?”

“Feels like it, Susan.”

“Still no sign of Witherspoon, Roger?”

“Susan, we’re getting … hold on, Susan. Someone’s talking … yes, good. We’ve got a location.”

“Which satellite, Roger?”

The feed from various orbiting satellites was flipping past in one corner of the screen … overhead shots of abandoned buildings on nearly identical empty streets.

“Do we have a number on that satellite, Roger?”

“Hold on, Susan. It’s coming in now.”

Susan Schnupftuch-Boermann Goereszky rolled her neck and flared her nostrils.

“2230. 2230. Satellite 2230, Susan!”

Dr. Greenway wrenched his neck now, rolling the tension out of his shoulders. Billy smiled and scanned his messages. Nothing that couldn’t wait ten minutes.

“Got him, Roger! There he is now!”

Satellite 2230 was up and feeding a beautiful tracking “god shot” of Carlos Witherspoon barreling out of some random building which was now on fire.

“Looks like that building’s on fire there, Roger.”

“Yes, it certainly does, Susan. It appears we’ve got some boots on the ground. They seem to have flushed him out there, Susan.”

“Oh no. Are they going to take him themselves?”

“Possibly, Susan. We just don’t … wait. Wait. Yes. I’m getting something.”

Consummate professional that she was, Susan Schnupftuch-Boermann Goereszky went straight to Real-Time Operator Feed, a risky move, but she just had a feeling. Carlos Witherspoon ran for his life, across an avenue and into a field, heading for a grove of crumbling buildings.

“We’re getting something …”

“I’m on it, Roger.”

The RTO Feed came up sharply, crosshairs groping and feeling for Carlos, who was doing a crazy zig-zag pattern across the field where there was no cover.

“Green, Susan. We’ve got a green here.”

The cycs in the studio went to green.

“Going green in the studio, Roger.”

Operator 225 was up. A silhouette showing his operator number and season statistics, which were all exemplary, appeared in the lower right corner of the screen.

“What can we say about our operator, Roger?”

“Susan, Operator 225 has 93 kills, 15 collateral, with an EEA of 2.1.”

“Pretty incredible numbers, Roger.”

“That’s right, Susan. And it’s only April.”

Operator 225 was good. Really good. Like circus shot good. Billy had seen him bank a missile off one moving car and into another, wasting an entire family of Targets with virtually zero collateral damage. Another time he’d flown one down a stairwell and into the lobby of this building, vaporizing everyone hiding in the lobby while the others upstairs went on with their breakfasts. What he was doing with Carlos Witherspoon was dancing the crosshairs back and forth against the direction and matching the speed of his zig-zag pattern across the field. Billy gave him, like, another twelve seconds before Carlos reached the safety of the buildings.

“This operator is amazing, Susan. He’s leading the target.”

“We’re watching it, Roger.”

The Foxtrot button on the RTO screen lit up suddenly.

Billy smiled.

“FOXTROT, SUSAN! FOXTROT! FOXTROT!”

Dr. Greenway leapt to his feet, bringing his crotch up into the camera. Billy chuckled. Carlos ran. Susan Schnupftuch-Boermann Goereszky kept her composure and went to NoseCam.

Southeast Region 423, wherever that was on the planet Earth, was rushing up into the screen, a blur of shuddering white and red and orange lights with squiggly tails, the patchwork grid of endless cities bleeding into other cities, indistinguishable, like a storm of stars, as the Godsend missile screamed down out of the night from twenty kilometers up. In a window in the lower left corner of the screen, Operator 225 was sweeping the delicate crosshairs back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, dancing with Carlos, intersecting him … now … now … now … and finally …

“WHOA! Unbelievable precision! Absolutely textbook, Susan! That’s got to be one for the highlight reel!”

“Let’s take a look at the replays, Roger.”

The screen was already subdividing, running an array of slow-mo replays of the kill from sixteen different angles. Billy froze one in which the missile hung in the air over Carlos Witherspoon, ten or twelve meters above and behind him, its cherry red nose cone pointed at the spot the stride he was taking would carry him into in approximately 0.06 seconds. In another window, he pulled up and readied the login screen of the K/B network. His shift began in forty-three seconds.

“Never knew what hit him, Susan.”

“His needless suffering is over now, Roger.”

“Not to mention the threat he posed, Susan.”

“Any details on what that was, Roger?”

“I’m afraid not, Susan. Definitely serious, though. Oh, look at that shot on Satellite 60! You can almost see the expression on his face.”

Billy pulled up his algorithmic script.

“Roger, we’re getting some breaking news in.”

“That is a dead center hit there, Susan!”

“Roger, we’re breaking away for a second.”

“Say again, Susan.”

Susan was gone. The picture had cut to a stock montage of Jimmy “Jimbo” Cartwright, III, founder and CEO of Finkles, the Transterritorial retail powerhouse, who’d been battling cancer for several decades, and who had suffered some sort of major setback. Senior News Anchor Chastaine Chandler, a stunning young Clear with designer lips and no hips at all who Billy had a crush on, appeared in a window in the upper right corner. Sadly, Jimbo’s condition was grave. The family had gathered at the Cartwright compound, filming on the grounds of which was not permitted, and had issued a statement thanking Jimbo’s millions of loyal customers and fans for their millions of emails, Fleeps and Tweaks, and prayers, and ongoing customer loyalty. Chastaine Chandler took a beat, shook her head in disbelief, and wiped a tear from the corner of her eye.

“I’d like to play a Fleep we received from a Finkles customer in Region 220 …”

Billy Jensen swiped her away and logged onto the K/B network.

#

Zone 23, by CJ Hopkins

Photo: U.S. Air Force, Tech. Sgt. Richard Lisum/Wikimedia Commons

[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.

 

Oceania is at War with Fascism

If you’re a critic of global capitalism (sometimes referred to as “globalism”), I’ve got some good news and some bad news for you. The good news is, you’re not a “peddler of Russian propaganda” anymore. The bad news is, you’re an anti-Semite.

You’re probably also a domestic terrorist, or an “emboldener” of domestic terrorism, or at least some sort of terrorism-apologist. And not good old-fashioned Islamic terrorism like we used to get during the War on Terror, because that ended in the Summer of 2016, right around the time Trump won the nomination. No, the brand of terrorism you are probably emboldening by criticizing global capitalism is anti-Semitic, fascist terrorism … the most terroristic form of terrorism there is!

Up until recently, you might have just been going about your normal business, criticizing global capitalism, completely unaware of your anti-Semitic, white supremacist terrorist activities, but from now on there will be no denying them. Your hate thoughts are right there for everyone to read. Go back and check your Facebook posts and your Twitter feed. You’ll see what I mean. All those times when you impulsively lashed out against the global capitalist ruling classes, or globalism, or Obama, or Clinton, or the Wall Street banks, or, God help you, George Soros … well, you might as well have been tweeting blinking neon GIFs of dancing Swastikas or posting Adolf Hitler’s speeches with little throbbing hearts and smiley-face emoticons.

See, according to the “Anti-Fascist Resistance” (i.e, the the Democratic Party, the “intelligence community,” the corporate media, those Wall Street banks, the military industrial complex, and other components of the global capitalist empire that doesn’t actually exist, except as a Nazi “conspiracy theory”), any references you might have made to “globalists,” or “globalism,” or the “corporate media,” or “banks,” or “Hollywood,” or the “1 percent,” or any other “elites,” didn’t really refer to what they referred to, but, in fact, were anti-Semitic “dog whistles.” If you went so far as to literally mention or include an unflattering photo of Soros in any of your posts or tweets, then you weren’t just “whistling” to your fascist dog friends, you were openly calling for a second Holocaust, or “inspiring” some anti-Semitic psycho to senselessly murder a bunch of people, as recently happened at that synagogue in Pittsburgh.

This newly rebranded “Anti-Fascist Resistance” (formerly known as the “Anti-Putin Resistance,” that is, until pre-election polling convinced them that most Americans were not responding to their “Russiagate” propaganda) has been working more or less around the clock to badger the public into believing that this psycho was an official “lone wolf terrorist” (i.e., a “terrorist” who has no affiliation with any actual terrorist organization), and that “America is on the brink of fascism,” and that Trump is “deploying the fascist playbook,” and that attacking the media is “the first step toward fascism,” and that Trump is a fascist because he isn’t a fascist (or something … I couldn’t quite make sense of that one), and, basically, that everyone should be afraid of fascism! Like that scene in Orwell’s 1984 when the Party abruptly switches official enemies in the middle of the Hate Week rally, the “Resistance” is counting on its loyal members to instantly forget the Russia hysteria they have been mindlessly parroting for almost two years, and start mindlessly parroting Fascism hysteria (as they mindlessly parroted the Terrorism hysteria throughout the Global War on Terror, until they switched to parroting the Russia hysteria after Trump got elected in 2016).

This recent rebranding of the neoliberal Resistance was a brilliant move, and is going quite well. It couldn’t have come at a better time, what with the midterm elections about to take place. While liberals were ready to swallow any anti-Trump narrative the corporate media rammed down their throats from the moment Clinton lost, much of the slightly-more-left-leaning Left never bought the Russiagate story. So it’s been tough for slimy beltway operatives like David Brock and other propagandists to unite “the Left” behind the Democratic Party, so they can put down this annoying “populist” insurgency, reinstall some Obama-like puppet, and get back to the business of globalism … no, not worldwide Jewish domination, you Jew-obsessed, neo-Nazi freaks, but, rather, the consolidation of corporate control over what remains of society, the abrogation of national sovereignty, and the establishment of a smiley, happy, multicultural, over-medicated, neo-feudal global capitalist marketplace. This Fascism hysteria is doing the trick!

This is the beauty of the “Putin-Nazi” narrative, which was designed to be a one-two punch. First, they hit us with the “Russiagate” hysteria, which worked like a charm on the kind of liberals who have no qualms about destroying whole countries, murdering hundreds of thousands of people in faraway lands that pose zero threat to us, and debt-enslaving millions of Americans to enrich the global investor classes, as long as someone like Obama is doing it. Then, once all the NPR liberals had been whipped into a hysterical frenzy over “Russian propaganda,” “collusion,” and so on, they hit us with the Fascism hysteria, which is working like a charm on the rest of the Left. (I haven’t seen any official polling, but when the official narrative is being mindlessly parroted, not only by the liberal corporate media, but also by “grassroots” left-wing outlets like Truthout, Democracy Now, and CounterPunch, you know their propaganda is working.)

Not that there aren’t a bunch of racists, anti-Semites, and other bigots out there. Of course there are. There always have been, just as there have always been terrorists out there (or non-state militants, depending on your perspective). Some of these racists and anti-Semites are obviously homicidal lunatics. This is not a new phenomenon. The American white supremacist fringe (and, sorry, but it is still a fringe) has been shooting and bombing innocent people, and otherwise doing their utmost to get their ridiculous “Racial Holy War” going since at least the early 1970s, and arguably since end of the Civil War. They have been doing this without any “emboldenment” from billionaire jackasses like Donald Trump, and they will continue to do this once Trump is gone and this Fascism hysteria has outlived its usefulness … like the War on Terror hysteria did.

If you’re in the mood to live a bit dangerously and want a little preview of what that will be like, switch off your smartphone for a minute, turn off the television, shut down the notebook, and walk out into the city, suburb, town, or gated community you live in. Does it look like the Nazis have taken over? OK, want to live even a little more dangerously? And I’m talking about flirting with serious thoughtcrime. Ask yourself, how many actual terrorists did you encounter during the War on Terror (that is, assuming you didn’t invade their country and start, you know, bombing and shooting at them)? Can you even remember as far back as July, when Oceania was at war with Russia, and Trump (temporarily) wasn’t Hitler, but was a treasonous “Russian intelligence asset,” who was almost certainly going to disband NATO, and a “crippling Russian cyber attack” on vital American infrastructure was imminent?

I doubt it, because that never happened. Oceania has never been at war with Russia. Oceania is at war with Fascism. Oceania has always been at war with Fascism. Donald Trump has always been Hitler. He has never been a Russian intelligence asset. Obama never put children in cages, or assassinated entire families at weddings. Trump’s nativism leads to anti-Semitism. America is not a safe place for Jews. The invasion of Iraq was just a tragic mistake, which will never, ever, happen again. There are no global capitalist elites, and anybody who says there are is an anti-Semite, and a fascistic  thoughtcriminal, and an emboldener of domestic terrorism, which is “a plague America can no longer ignore.” Oh, yeah, and I almost forgot, the Ministry of Plenty has just announced that there will be no reduction of the chocolate ration. The chocolate ration will be increased!

So don’t forget to vote blue tomorrow and help the Party defeat the fascists! Or, if you’re one of the fascists, don’t forget to vote red tomorrow and help the Party save America from that Jewish Mexican zombie horde that is coming to steal your fruit-picking job! And whatever you do, stay tuned to the telescreen, and do not start thinking about global capitalism, or the manufacture of mass hysteria, or put anything into any kind of broader historical or geopolitical context. That kind of thinking leads straight to thoughtcrime … and we all know where thoughtcrime leads.

#

CJ Hopkins

November 5, 2018

Photo: Ministry of Truth

[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 Putin-Nazi-Terrorist-O-Matic

I suppose it was always just a matter of time until the global capitalist ruling classes and their mouthpieces in the corporate media combined their two main official narratives into a Ronco-type 2-in-1 kind of deal. That’s right, folks, your days of switching between the War on Terror official narrative and the Putin-Nazi official narrative are over, because now, for just $19.99, the Putin-Nazi-Terrorist-O-Matic® takes care of all your official narrative needs with just the press of one button!

Here’s how it works. First, you take your classic mentally-disturbed individual, someone like, say, John Hinkley, Jr., Mark David Chapman, or Travis Bickle, or a total wack job like Cesar Sayoc, and you paint whichever clearly psychotic crimes he’s committed as acts of “terrorism.” Don’t worry about the definition of “terrorism” or how it has become a virtually meaningless label the capitalist ruling classes and corporate media can slap onto anyone. Just keep saying “terrorist,” “terrorism,” and any other lexical derivatives of “terror,” over and over, like some kind of mantra … you know, like the Hare Krishnas do.

Next, you take whatever obsession your disturbed individual is maniacally obsessed with, and you paint that obsession as an “ideology,” or some kind of organized political movement, as if your wack job was actually a rational person and not just a totally paranoid geek who decided to attempt to assassinate Reagan because he couldn’t get a date with Jodie Foster, or to murder John Lennon because God had ordered him to do so in a J. D. Salinger novel.

Now, this works much better if your disturbed individual is actually obsessed with something political, like, say, if he’s a Donald Trump fanatic who has plastered the windows of the van he’s living in with all sorts of blatantly psychotic artwork deifying Donald Trump and demonizing Donald Trump’s political opponents, but you’ll have to work with what your lunatic gives you. In any event, whatever his pathology, you will need to de-pathologize your psycho, so you can misrepresent him as a “domestic terrorist,” and then associate whatever “ideology” you’ve just painted onto him with “terrorism.”

If that sounds a little complicated, don’t worry, folks, it’s really not! The ruling classes and the corporate media just provided us with a demonstration of the Putin-Nazi-Terrorist-O-Matic in action, which proves how easy-to-use it is. In the span of just a single week, they whipped up so much mass paranoia that, by the weekend, millions of hysterical liberals were calling for a Deep State coup, and the arrest and internment of all registered Republicans, because a right-wing loon had sent a bunch of non-exploding bomblike devices to prominent members of the neoliberal “Resistance,” or rather, to their respective mail-screening services.

These Putin-Nazi Terrorist “bomb-like devices” were “intercepted” throughout last week. Their targets were a roll call of Resistance heroes, Soros, Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, the offices of CNN, Eric Holder, Maxine Waters, Joe Biden, and, yes, even Robert De Niro! Putin-Nazi panic paralyzed the nation! The neoliberal corporate media (who, remember, are serious, respected professionals, not conspiracist nuts like Alex Jones) began pouring out pieces informing the world that Donald Trump was behind these attacks, or had encouraged, “emboldened,” or “inspired” whoever was with his violent, neo-Hitlerian rhetoric.

The Washington Post went full Shakespearean with Dana Milbank’s What Hath Trump Wrought? The New York Times explained how Trump was employing a strategy called “stochastic terrorism,” i.e., inspiring random acts of violence that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable! “Trump’s words have consequences,” The Guardian lectured. “Words matter,” CNN concurred. John Brennan, who courageously continued to appear on television, despite the ongoing terrorist threat, affirmed that Trump’s “un-American” rhetoric had “emboldened individuals to take matters into their own hands.” Even “alternative” Resistance outlets like Truthout joined the chorus of voices reporting that “Trump’s Rhetoric Emboldens Violence!”

By Thursday morning, #MAGAbomber, #MAGATerrorist, and other such hashtags were circulating widely on Twitter. Which meant it was only a matter of time until the Resistance linked these stochastically-terrorist MAGA bomber attacks to Russia. On Thursday evening, MSNBC’s Chuck Todd did exactly that, speculating that “this could be a Russian operation!” (Washington Post propagandist Craig Timberg, author of the infamous McCarthyite smear piece on “peddlers of Russian propaganda” that got the whole “fake news” hysteria going back in December 2016, would soon follow up with this ridiculous attempt to connect the “MAGA Terrorist” to Russia … but I’m getting a little ahead of myself.)

By Friday, after anti-Terrorism specialists (or the kids that work in the mail screening room) “intercepted” more “bomb-like devices” addressed to Senator Cory Booker and ex-National Intelligence Director James Clapper, the neoliberal punditocracy were soiling themselves on national television. This was it! The long-awaited Putin-Nazi Apocalypse had finally begun! And just as Paul Krugman had prophesied it would … or, OK, not exactly like that, but still, Trump was, once again, about to suspend the Constitution, declare martial law, and appoint himself dictator! Clearly, Putin had ordered Trump to launch the destruction of Western democracy by deploying the dreaded Totally Incompetent Domestic Terrorist Mail Bomber Strategy … and just in time for the midterm elections!

And then, just like that, they caught him … Cesar “the Jackal” Sayoc, Jr., the terrorist mastermind that had nearly perpetrated another 9-11-type event, and who was sleeping in his van behind an auto parts store! As is standard procedure for terrorist sleeper agents, Sayoc, until he was “activated,” had been maintaining a totally low-profile cover as juiced-up, body-building, racist male stripper with an extensive criminal record and an obsession with Trump. Like the “Skripal assassins” and other Putin-Nazi operatives, he had made a point of getting himself photographed and noticed by witnesses in various public places, and otherwise drawing attention to himself, which is one of the first things they teach you at the Kremlin. Sayoc hasn’t yet divulged the names and ranks of his handlers in the GRU, but, presumably, Eliot Higgins and Bellingcat are hard at work googling that right this minute.

In the meantime, the liberal corporate media have been working the Putin-Nazi-Terrorist-O-Matic on a more or less 24/7 basis. It is crucial at a time like this, when mass hysteria is reaching peak levels, that the public not be allowed to believe that this “MAGA Terrorist” is merely one more pathetic, attention-seeking geek who decided to vent his impotent rage on those he perceived as his mortal enemies. Same goes for the Pittsburgh synagogue attacker, who struck as I was writing this piece. Never mind that this homicidal idiot did not like Trump, who he condemned as a “Jew-lover.” In order to maintain the official narrative, the ruling classes need us to believe that he was not just another anti-Semite with a gun collection and a gab.com account, but, rather, an official “domestic terrorist,” who was probably “radicalized” by Donald Trump’s rhetoric!

Look, I’m no fan of Donald Trump, or racism, or anti-Semitism, or any other type of bigotry (despite what my smear-happy former editors at CounterPunch would like you to believe). What I am is a student of the production of ideology. I lived through the deployment of the official “War on Terror” narrative after 9-11, and then watched in frustration as millions of Americans mindlessly supported a war of aggression, the abrogation of many of their civil liberties, torture, and various other atrocities, based on nothing but propaganda and media-generated mass hysteria.

We are experiencing a similarly historic ideological readjustment at the moment, which I’ve been trying to capture (satirically and more seriously) since it began in the summer of 2016. The official “War on Terror” narrative (and people’s understanding of what “terrorism” is) is being gradually redefined and expanded to encompass any and all forms of “extremism” (i.e., whatever the ruling classes decide is “extremism”). Mass murder, battery, racist graffiti, opposing the spread of global capitalism, saying nasty things about Soros, tattooing your forehead with a giant Swastika, using the words “globalism,” “sovereignty,” and so on … the distinctions are rapidly disappearing. The media-generated mass hysteria over Islamic terrorism during the War on Terror is being replaced with media-generated mass hysteria over Nazis and Russians (unless you’re a die-hard Trump supporter, in which case, you’ve got your immigration hysteria, but my focus is on ruling class ideology, which, despite the existence of Donald Trump, remains neoliberal, supranational, and, yes, God help me, globalist in nature). Any and all forms of opposition to global capitalist ideology, regardless of whether they come from the Left or the Right, are being stigmatized as “extremism,” and thus inextricably linked to “terrorism.” I described this, back in January, as a global capitalist “War on Dissent,” and I think events over the last ten months have largely confirmed my diagnosis.

I’d love to go on, but this essay is already way too long for people’s phones, and the midterm elections are fast approaching, so this is no time for critical thinking … and plus, news is just coming in from Guardian columnist Christina Patterson that Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party are also responsible for the Pittsburgh attack, and for “emboldening” all these “extremists” and “terrorists,” and for “normalizing” anti-Semitism and fascism, and mass murder, and who knows what other atrocities, and I don’t want to miss a chance to catch the Putin-Nazi-Terrorist-O-Matic in action!

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CJ Hopkins

October 29, 2018

Photo: Cesar Sayoc, Jr.

[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 Assassination of Donald Trump

OK … here’s a question for you. Let’s assume, strictly for the purposes of argument, that Donald Trump is literally Hitler, or at least a proto-Hitlerian fascist, like the neoliberal ruling classes and the corporate media have been saying he is. And let’s go ahead and also assume that he’s a treasonous Russian intelligence asset working in league with Vladimir Putin to destroy the very fabric of Western democracy, and that he isn’t even legitimately President, because he stole the election from Hillary Clinton with all those Russian bots and Facebook posts, and all that other stuff they’ve been accusing him of, which would make him the most monstrously evil villain in the history of monstrously evil villains, not to mention an existential threat to the nation, and Americans, and … well, the rest of humanity. And so, basically, what I want to know is, why don’t they just kill this guy?

Seriously, if Trump is really Hitler, and a traitor, working for a foreign enemy, like The New York Times and more or less every other organ of the corporate media has been telling us he is for the last two years, well, how about getting SEAL Team 6 to storm the White House in the dead of night and shoot him in the face or something? That seems to go over pretty well with people. Or what about a simple heart attack? Don’t our spooks have some kind of heart attack juice that they could slip into his Diet Coke, or smear onto the doorknob of the Oval Office?

Not that there’s really any need for subtlety. After all, if he’s actually a Russian operative, and a proto-Hitlerian genocidal dictator, there’s no reason to run a covert op or attempt to cover anything up. On the contrary, you would want do it openly, proudly, where all Americans could see it. Which is why I’d go with the DEVGRU option. They could waste him live on CNN. The bloodier the better. Just imagine the ratings! They could march into the Oval Office in that cool-looking kill squad body armor and beat him to death with a gold-plated golf club. It’s not like he’d put up much of a fight. What is he, like seventy years old or something?

All right, I know you’re probably thinking that beating a sitting president to death with a gold-plated gap wedge is nothing to joke about, and that doing so (i.e., joking about it, not actually beating the President to death) is possibly a federal crime or whatever, but we’re talking Adolf Hitler here, folks. Do I have to link to every one of the literally thousands of impassioned editorials, articles, and TV and radio segments in which respected journalists at serious news outlets have warned us, over and over, and over, that Donald Trump is literally Hitler, or virtually Hitler, and probably also a Russian agent? I don’t think so. Do you think that respectable publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Time, and so on, would print such inflammatory allegations if the fate of democracy were not at stake? That would be rather reckless, wouldn’t it? I mean, how many times can you call a guy Hitler before Americans demand that somebody kill him?

This is what we do, after all. Killing Hitler is America’s thing. America has been killing Hitler since … well, since Hitler killed himself. Saddam was Hitler. We killed him, didn’t we? Or we got some guys to kill him for us. Same goes for Gaddafi. He was Hitler. We killed the hell out of him. That was fun. We got some guys to sodomize him with a bayonet, and shoot him in the head, and then we laughed about it on national television. Oh, and Osama bin Laden. He was definitely Hitler … OK, not while he was working with the CIA, but later, after he went native on us. We shot him in the face and dumped in the ocean. And Milosevic, he was also Hitler! OK, we didn’t kill him, but we killed his whole country, then we put him on trial in the Hague for war crimes. And what about Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, Khomeini, Bashar al Assad, and all the other Hitlers we wanted to kill, or tried to kill but couldn’t kill? The list goes on and on, and on.

I kid you not, if there is anything Americans love more than working a hundred hours a week and buying stuff with credit cards, it is repeatedly killing Adolf Hitler. You just point at somebody, call him Hitler, and Americans are ready to help you kill him. And, even if someone isn’t technically Hitler, as long as those respectable news sources tell us it’s OK to kill them … well, that’s usually good enough for us.

For example, if you’re messing around with our “interests,” like maybe interfering with our corporations’ exploitation of your Central American country, we will have no choice but to fund and train some sadistic death squads to hideously torture and murder your people until you come to your senses. Or, if you’re even considering aligning with some annoying, fanatically religious regime that deposed the puppet we installed in their country, and that is sitting in the middle of the Middle East screwing up our restructuring plans, and which the Russians won’t let us tactically nuke, well, we’ll have to help our friends, the Saudis, bomb the living Allah out of you, starve your women and children to death, and otherwise wipe you off the face of the Earth.

So let’s not suddenly get all squeamish about killing Hitler or … you know, whoever. Killing Hitlers, and other bogeymen, and innocent men, women, and children is as American as apple pie, not to mention an extremely profitable business. So what’s the problem here, exactly? Either Trump is Hitler or he isn’t Hitler. If he’s Hitler, and a traitorous Russian agent, like all those respected media sources, and those anonymous “Intelligence Community” sources, and those people on Twitter say he is, what the hell is taking so long? Why doesn’t somebody get in there and kill him? What good are all these black ops types if they can’t even save America from Hitler?

I don’t know, maybe the ruling classes don’t believe they have generated enough public support with all their “resistance” and “Hitler” stuff to brutally assassinate the president on television (which is hard to fathom, given the relentless propaganda campaign they’ve been concertedly waging). Perhaps it needs to be a grassroots effort. In which case, maybe the Democratic Party, Bill Kristol, Rob Reiner, Rachel Maddow, Michael Moore, General Hayden, Hillary Clinton, Alec Baldwin, the Editorial Board of The New York Times, and other key Resistance fighters could organize a “March to Assassinate Trump.” People could break out their pussyhats again. Everyone loves those pussyhats! They could march on CIA headquarters in Langley. Just think of all the signs and slogans  … “SCREW DEMOCRACY, JUST KILL HIM ALREADY!” “WHAT WOULD WILLIAM CASEY DO?” and the always popular call and response, “TELL ME WHAT THE DEEP STATE LOOKS LIKE … THIS IS WHAT THE DEEP STATE LOOKS LIKE!” The possibilities are almost endless!

I’m not saying it would be a cakewalk … or that there wouldn’t be any kind of blowback. The Resistance would likely catch a little flak from the millions of toothless, Oxy-addicted, white supremacist Nazis that voted for the guy. There would probably be a bit of “civil unrest,” but then, what’s the point of militarizing virtually every major police force in the country if you’re not prepared to turn them loose on the citizenry every once and while? And anyway, the main thing is, regardless of how messy things would probably get, it would provide the global capitalist ruling classes with an opportunity to remind these unruly “populists” what happens when you vote for Hitler!

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CJ Hopkins

October 22, 2018

Photo: Alisdare Hickson CC BY-SA 2.0

[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.

Please Remember Not to Vote!

So, it’s three weeks before the US midterm elections, and it looks like we have got ourselves a horse race! That’s right, folks, once again, it’s time to start playing with those forecast maps on Real Clear Politics and FiveThirtyEight, and obsessively following the fluctuating poll numbers of congressional candidates you have never heard of competing in districts you couldn’t locate if someone held a gun to your head. You need to start doing this immediately, if not sooner, as the stakes in these midterms could not be higher. Nothing less than the continued existence of “American democracy” hangs in the balance, so the ruling classes need every last one of us to get out there and vote for somebody!

The fact that it only marginally matters who that somebody that you vote for is should not dissuade you from voting for somebody. Voting for somebody is your civic duty, and is no less important than rooting for a sports team, or maintaining a personal favorite color, or celebrity, or brand of hemorrhoid creme. Remember, if you don’t vote for somebody, somebody else is going to win, and we can’t afford to let that happen!

Now, your choices this year are particularly exciting, despite the fact that they are exactly the same as in every other US election since approximately the 1970s. Yes, that’s right, once again, it’s the Transgender Panethnic Communists of Color versus the Old White Cisnormal Capitalist Nazis, and what a spectacle it promises to be! The Old White Cisnormal Capitalist Nazis (hereinafter the “OWCCN”) currently control … well, pretty much everything (i.e., the House, the Senate, and executive branch), and so the Transgender Panethnic Communists of Color (hereinafter the “TPCoC”) are hungry, and are looking for some serious payback after getting their butts kicked in 2016. Rumor has it, the TPCoC are preparing to unleash a “Blue Tsunami” on vulnerable OWCCN incumbents, take control of the House of Representatives, and then not impeach the ass clown President they’ve been telling everyone for the last two years is both a traitorous Russian intelligence asset and the resurrection of Adolf Hitler.

And, if that isn’t exciting enough for you already, they’ve got all kinds of other life-and-death issues to emotionally pressure you into picking a team to fanatically root for on social media, and then getting out and voting for somebody. How blatantly to humiliate illegal immigrants, how affluent you have to be to obtain an abortion, how much interest banks can charge when you pay for your chemo with an Amazon card, and which pronouns law enforcement officers are required to use to refer to people whose homes they barge into and unintentionally murder, are just a few of the many “hot-button” questions requiring your democratic input.

Other questions, like whether to invade or just strategically bomb Iran or Syria, or some other non-ball-playing Middle East country, or pour billions more in military aid into Israel, or sell billions in weapons to Saudi Arabia, or foment a coup in Venezuela, or maintain almost eight hundred military outposts in over seventy foreign countries all around the world, are questions that do not require your input. The global capitalist ruling classes, the corporations they own and operate, their friends in the government and the intelligence agencies, and the corporate media will take care of all that. Same goes for those Wall Street banks, and the next looming global financial crisis, and those mass extinctions, and this wacky weather. The grown-ups with the fancy suits and haircuts are handling all that complicated stuff. You just worry about all those other issues, and get out there and vote for somebody!

Seriously, though, for those unfamiliar with the ins and outs of U.S. politics, our election cycle, and these midterm elections, and thus do not have the slightest idea what I’m even referring to, here’s what’s going on in a nutshell …

On November 6, 2018, Americans will be returning to the polls to exercise their inalienable right to choose between two corporate-financed, ruling class-vetted political stooges competing for the chance to pretend to represent them in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and in various gubernatorial, municipal, and somewhat lesser distinguished chambers. A selection of non-ruling-class-vetted candidates will also appear on a handful of ballots. Americans will be free to vote for such candidates, as long as they realize they are just wasting their time, and possibly damaging the “serious” candidates, which the corporate media will remind them they are doing at every available opportunity.

See, unlike in backward European countries, where some semblance of a parliament still exists, and there are actual campaign finance restrictions and limits on televised campaign advertising, in the United States, where everyone is free, voting for non-ruling-class-vetted candidates, in a midterm or any other election, is about as effective as voting for a sandwich … or for, you know, some narcissistic billionaire ass clown who swears he is going to “drain the swamp,” and build “a beautiful wall,” or whatever. The system is designed to guarantee that no matter which ruling class stooge you vote for, and even if you vote for a character like Trump just to stick it to the establishment for once, it makes no difference … or, OK, very little difference.

The reason for this is not a big mystery. When a seat in the Senate goes for ten million dollars and a seat in the House for over a million, and there are no real restrictions on campaign financing, and the corporate-owned media decide in advance which candidates will be given airtime, and considered “serious” by the mainstream pundits who work for the handful of corporations that own the vast majority of newspapers, television and radio stations, and internet platforms that control the flow of information to the American public … well, it would kind of be a little odd, wouldn’t it, if authentic anti-ruling-class candidates were allowed to enter and compete in that system?

Most Americans understand this, which is why nearly half of them do not vote. It’s humiliating enough to be forced to live, and attempt to support a family, and so on, in a savage, neoliberal marketplace with virtually no social cohesion whatsoever, and in which the only real operative value is money, without also having to debase themselves by participating in the simulation of democracy that the capitalist ruling classes need to maintain in order to pretend that they are not just social parasites with a lot of goons and guns.

Which brings me to the point of this essay. See, normally, I try like hell to avoid telling people what to do in my columns, but, after my last one, a number of readers wrote in asking for advice, so I’m going to make an exception, just this once.

Here’s my advice. You’re not going to like it.

Do not vote. For anyone. At all. Tell all your friends not to vote for anyone. Join the hundreds of millions of Americans who refuse to participate in the simulation of democracy. Take time off from work to vote, and then do not vote. Go see a movie, or have lunch with someone you haven’t seen in a while, or take a nice, long walk in the woods or something. Whatever you do, do not vote. Seriously. Please stop voting for these people. They’re not your friends. They mean you ill. They will shake your hand, kiss your baby, then sell you to the first pharmaceutical lobbyist, or military industrial lobbyist, or Israeli or Saudi Arabian lobbyist, that waltzes into their office with a check, or that threatens to turn their voters against them.

You probably think I’m kidding. I’m not. Do not vote in these midterm elections. Or in any other American elections. Not while the system remains as it is. If you really want to vote, move to Europe, where at least there are still parliamentary structures, and a decent variety of political parties, and some restrictions on campaign financing and advertising. All you’re doing when you vote in America is reifying a simulation of democracy, and so perpetuating the system as it is.

Oh, and while you’re at it, if you happen to work for any of those pharmaceutical companies, or any of those weapons manufacturers, or their suppliers, or for an investment bank, or a hedge fund, or private equity firm, or any other company, corporation, firm, consultancy, or department of government that is central to keeping the American political and economic system going as it is, quit your job and do something else. Seriously, go into the office today (or get up from your desk right now) and quit, and go find something else to do with the gift of your sentient life on this planet. I realize that might be a scary proposition, but that’s what it’s going to take to change things, a lot of people deciding they have had it and are not going to play the game anymore.

That’s pretty much all the advice I’ve got. Sorry … I told you you weren’t going to like it.

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CJ Hopkins

October 15, 2018

Photo: US PGA TOUR

[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.

Who Doesn’t Love Identity Politics?

If there is one thing that still unites Americans across the ever more intellectually suffocating and bitterly polarized political spectrum our imaginations have been crammed into like rush hour commuters on the Tokyo Metro, it’s our undying love of identity politics.

Who doesn’t love identity politics? Liberals love identity politics. Conservatives love identity politics. Political parties love identity politics. Corporations love identity politics. Advertisers, anarchists, white supremacists, Wall Street bankers, Hollywood producers, Twitter celebrities, the media, academia … everybody loves identity politics.

Why do we love identity politics? We love them for many different reasons.

The ruling classes love identity politics because they keep the working classes focused on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and so on, and not on the fact that they (i.e., the working classes) are, essentially, glorified indentured servants, who will spend the majority of their sentient existences laboring to benefit a ruling elite that would gladly butcher their entire families and sell their livers to hepatitic Saudi princes if they could get away with it. Dividing the working classes up into sub-groups according to race, ethnicity, and so on, and then pitting these sub-groups against each other, is extremely important to the ruling classes, who are, let’s remember, a tiny minority of intelligent but physically vulnerable parasites controlling the lives of the vast majority of human beings on the planet Earth, primarily by keeping them ignorant and confused.

The political parties love identity politics because they allow them to conceal the fact that they are bought and paid for by these ruling classes, which, in our day and age, means corporations and a handful of obscenely wealthy oligarchs who would gut you and your kids like trout and sell your organs to the highest bidder if they thought they could possibly get away with it. The political parties employ identity politics to maintain the simulation of democracy that prevents Americans (many of whom are armed) from coming together, forming a mob, dismantling this simulation of democracy, and then attempting to establish an actual democracy, of, by, and for the people, which is, basically, the ruling classes’ worst nightmare. The best way to avoid this scenario is to keep the working classes ignorant and confused, and at each other’s throats over things like pronouns, white privilege, gender appropriate bathrooms, and the complexion and genitalia of the virtually interchangeable puppets the ruling classes allow them to vote for.

The corporate media, academia, Hollywood, and the other components of the culture industry are similarly invested in keeping the vast majority of people ignorant and confused. The folks who populate this culture industry, in addition to predicating their sense of self-worth on their superiority to the unwashed masses, enjoy spending time with the ruling classes, and reaping the many benefits of serving them … and, while most of them wouldn’t personally disembowel your kids and sell their organs to some dope-addled Saudi trillionaire scion, they would look the other way while the ruling classes did, and then invent some sort of convoluted rationalization of why it was necessary, in order to preserve democracy and freedom (or was some sort of innocent but unfortunate “blunder,” which will never, ever, happen again).

The fake Left loves identity politics because they allow them to pretend to be “revolutionary” and spout all manner of “militant” gibberish while posing absolutely zero threat to the ruling classes they claim to be fighting. Publishing fake Left “samizdats” (your donations to which are tax-deductible), sanctimoniously denouncing racism on Twitter, milking whatever identity politics scandal is making headlines that day, and otherwise sounding like a slightly edgier version of National Public Radio, are all popular elements of the fake Left repertoire.

Marching along permitted parade routes, assembling in designated “free speech areas,” and listening to speeches by fake Left celebrities and assorted Democratic Party luminaries, are also well-loved fake Left activities. For those who feel the need to be even more militant, pressuring universities to cancel events where potentially “violent” and “oppressive” speech acts (or physical gestures) might occur, toppling offensive historical monuments, ratting out people to social media censors, or masking up and beating the crap out of “street Nazis” are among the available options. All of these activities, by herding potential troublemakers into fake Left ghettos and wasting their time, both on- and off-line, help to ensure that the ruling classes, their political puppets, the corporate media, Hollywood, and the rest of the culture industry can keep most people ignorant and confused.

Oh, and racists, hardcore white supremacists, anti-Semites, and other far-Right wing nuts … my God, do they love identity politics! Identity politics are their entire worldview (or Weltanschauung, for you Nazi fetishists). Virtually every social, political, economic, and ontological phenomenon can be explained by reducing it to race, ethnicity, religion, or some other simplistic criterion, according to these “alt-Right” geniuses. And to render everything even more simplistic, each and every one of their simplistic theories can be subsumed into a meta-simplistic theory, which amounts to (did you guess it?) a conspiracy of Jews.

According to this meta-theory, this conspiracy of Jews (which is headquartered in Israel, but maintains offices in Los Angeles and New York, from which it controls the corporate media, Hollywood, and the entire financial sector) is responsible for … well, anything they can think of. September 11 attacks? Conspiracy of Jews. Financial crisis? Jews, naturally. Black on Black crime? Jews again! Immigration? Globalization? Gun control laws? Abortion? Drugs? Media bias? Who else could be behind it all but Jews?!

See, the thing is, there is no essential difference between your identity politics-brainwashed liberal and your Swastika-tattooed white supremacist. Both are looking at the world through the lens of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or some other type of “identity.” They are looking through this “identity” lens (whichever one it happens to be) because either they have been conditioned to do so (most likely from the time they were children) or they have made a conscious choice to do so (after recognizing, and affirming or rejecting, whatever conditioning they received as children).

Quantum physicists, Sufi fakirs, and certain other esoterics understand what most of us don’t, namely, that there is no such thing as “the Truth,” or “Reality,” apart from our perception of it. The world, or “reality,” or whatever you want to call it, is more than happy to transform itself into any imaginable shape and form, based on the lens you are looking at it through. It’s like a trickster in that regard. Look at “reality” through a racist lens, and everything will make sense according to that logic. Look at it through a social justice lens, or a Judeo-Christian lens, or a Muslim lens, or a scientific or a Scientologist lens, or a historical materialist or capitalist lens (it really makes no difference at all) … and abracadabra! A new world is born!

Sadly, most of us never reach the stage in our personal (spiritual?) development where we are able to make a conscious choice about which lens we want to view the world through. Mostly, we stick with the lens we were originally issued by our families and societies. Then we spend the rest of our fleeting lives desperately insisting that our perspective is “the Truth,” and that other perspectives are either “lies” or “errors.” The fact that we do this is unsurprising, as the ruling classes (of whatever society we happened to be born and socialized into) are intensely invested in issuing everyone a “Weltanschauung lens” that corresponds to whatever narrative they are telling themselves about why they deserve to be the ruling classes and we deserve to exist to serve them, fight their wars, pay interest on their loans, not to mention rent to live on the Earth, which they have claimed as their own and divided up amongst themselves to exploit and ruin, which they justify with “laws” they invented, which they enforce with armies, police, and prisons, which they teach us as children to believe is “just the way life is” … but I digress.

So, who doesn’t love identity politics? Well, I don’t love identity politics. But then I tend to view political events in the context of enormous, complex systems operating beyond the level of the individuals and other entities such systems comprise. Thus I’ve kind of been keeping an eye on the restructuring of the planet by global capitalism that started in the early 1990s, following the collapse of the U.S.S.R., when global capitalism (not the U.S.A.) became the first globally hegemonic system in the history of aspiring hegemonic systems.

Now, this system (i.e., capitalism, not the U.S.A), being globally hegemonic, has no external enemies, so what it’s been doing since it became hegemonic is aggressively destabilizing and restructuring the planet according to its systemic needs (most notably in the Middle East, but also throughout the rest of the world), both militarily and ideologically. Along the way, it has encountered some internal resistance, first, from the Islamic “terrorists,” more recently, from the so-called “nationalists” and “populists,” none of whom seem terribly thrilled about being destabilized, restructured, privatized, and debt-enslaved by global capitalism, not to mention relinquishing what remains of their national sovereignty, and their cultures, and so on.

I’ve been writing about this for over two years, so I am not going to rehash it all in detail here (this essay is already rather long). The short version is, what we are currently experiencing (i.e., Brexit, Trump, Italy, Hungary, et cetera, the whole “populist” or “nationalist” phenomenon) is resistance (an insurgency, if you will) to hegemonic global capitalism, which is, essentially, a values-decoding machine, which eliminates “traditional” (i.e., despotic) values (e.g., religious, cultural, familial, societal, aesthetic, and other such non-market values) and replaces them with a single value, exchange value, rendering everything a commodity.

The fact that I happen to be opposed to some of those “traditional” values (i.e., racism, anti-Semitism, oppression of women, homosexuals, and so on) does not change my perception of the historical moment, or the sociopolitical, sociocultural, and economic forces shaping that moment. God help me, I believe it might be more useful to attempt to understand those forces than to go around pointing and shrieking at anyone who doesn’t conform to my personal views like the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

But that’s the lens I choose to look through. Maybe I’ve got it all assbackwards. Maybe what is really going on is that Russia “influenced” everyone into voting for Brexit and Donald Trump, and hypnotized them all with those Facebook ads into hating women, people of color, transsexuals, and the Jews, of course, and all that other “populist” stuff, because the Russians hate us for our freedom, and are hell-bent on destroying democracy and establishing some kind of neo-fascist, misogynist, pseudo-Atwoodian dystopia. Or, I don’t know, maybe the other side is right, and it really is all a conspiracy of Jews … transsexual, immigrant Jews of color, who want to force us all to have late-term abortions and circumcise our kids, or something.

I wish I could help you sort all that out, but I’m just a lowly political satirist, and not an expert on identity politics or anything. I’m afraid you’ll have to pick a lens through which to interpret “reality” yourself. But then, you already have, haven’t you … or are you still looking through the one that was issued to you?

#

CJ Hopkins

October 8, 2018

Photo: The United Colors of Benetton

[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.

How to Maliciously Smear Your Critics (and Not Get Away with It)

The life of a professional political satirist is many things, but it is certainly never boring. Last week, for example, was particularly not boring. OK, I wasn’t called before a Senate committee to testify against a rapey nominee to the highest court in the United States, or smeared by the right-wing media for doing so, nothing that dramatic or consequential. No, while most Americans were parsing every “he said” and “she said” of the Kavanaugh hearings, I was embroiled in my own little sordid drama involving “going public,” and smears, and my colleagues attempting to assassinate my character, and so on.

What happened was, I got the kiss-off from CounterPunch (where I had been a contributor for over two years) by CounterPunch’s Red-Brown Putin-Nazi hunting squad. That, or the editors just overlooked my submissions, or they decided not to run them, or they were going to run them, after having overlooked them, but then decided not to run them, because I’d already run them, after they didn’t run them … or something. I can’t keep all their stories straight.

This kiss-off (or confusion, depending on who you believe) happened after I submitted a piece, Putin-Nazi Paranoia, responding to a featured essay in CounterPunch smearing a number of leftist writers (and me by extension) as “far-right shills.” Smearing leftist writers they do not approve of has become a standard feature of CounterPunch. As far as I recall, it began in earnest in the Summer of 2017, when they accused Caitlin Johnstone of Red-Brown activities, i.e, promoting an unholy union of ultra-far-right and ultra-far-left movements (or “neo-Strasserism,” for you Putin-Nazi scholars).

This was a extremely ignominious episode, as Johnstone documented at the time, and followed up on about a year later. Featured essays in CounterPunch by Yoav Litvin and CounterPunch editors Joshua Frank and Jeffrey St. Clair either openly claimed or insinuated that Johnstone was a Red-Brown infiltrator who was calling for an alliance with white supremacists, which, of course, was a load of paranoid nonsense. Diana Johnstone (no relation to Caitlin) also covered this brouhaha in her essay about the CounterPunch Red-Brown hunter squad (which, in addition to Litvin, St. Clair, and Frank, include other characters like Anthony DiMaggio, author of the above-mentioned “far right shill” piece, Eric Draitser, the official team cheerleader, and Alexander Reid Ross, who is a bull goose loony. Sadly, Diana left out Louis Proyect, the notorious “unrepentant Marxist” creep, who, although not technically a CounterPunch editor, appears to have quite a lot of influence at the magazine … I have never really understood why that is.

In any event, after I announced that CounterPunch had stopped running my pieces, and asked for help spreading them around on the Internet, they promptly began smearing me as an anti-Semite (or continued smearing me as an anti-Semite, because Louis Proyect had already been trying his best to smear me as an anti-Semite). They base their smears on the fact that my essays have been re-posted by The Unz Review, which the CounterPunch Red-Brown hunting squad have become increasingly obsessed with lately. (For the record, my essays have also been re-posted by outlets like ColdType, The Greanville Post, OffGuardian, Entelekheia, Le Grand Soir, ZeroHedge, Dissident Voice, Black Agenda Report, and other such outlets, and people’s personal blogs. I do not work for any of these outlets. They have simply been kind enough to re-post my essays, each of which originally appeared in CounterPunch, until the last two essays in question. Weirdly, the CounterPunch editors do not appear to be concerned about these other outlets, nor even, consistently, about The Unz Review, as they just featured this essay by Michael Hudson, which had been featured two days earlier by The Unz Review, where Hudson is listed as a columnist.)

But I’m not going to defend The Unz Review, or Michael Hudson, or any of the many other writers, whether left or right, that are posted, or re-posted, on that site. Nor am I going to defend myself against the smears leveled at me by the CounterPunch editors. Why, you probably want to know, am I not going to do that?

OK, I’ll tell you.

Because that is precisely how the smear game works. The way it works is, the smearers bait the smearee into defending himself against the defamatory content of the smears. Once the smearee has done that, the smearers have him. From then on, the focus of the debate becomes whether or not the smears are accurate, rather than why he’s being smeared, how he’s being smeared, and who is smearing him. This is the smearers’ primary objective, i.e., to establish the boundaries of the debate, and to trap the target of the smears within them. If you’ve followed the fake “Labour Anti-Semitism” scandal, you’ve witnessed this tactic deployed against Corbyn, who unfortunately fell right into the trap and gave the smearers the upper hand. No, the only way to effectively counter a smear campaign (whether large-scale or small-scale), is to resist the temptation to profess your innocence, and, instead, focus as much attention on the tactics and the motives of the smearers as possible. It is difficult to resist this temptation, especially when the people smearing you have significantly more power and influence than you do, and are calling you a racist and an anti-Semite, but, trust me, the moment you start defending yourself, the game is over, and the smearers have won.

With that in mind, and for those readers who are tempted to just take the word of an established leftist magazine like CounterPunch over that of minor author who they may not have ever even heard of, I am posting the following email exchange between Jeffrey St. Clair, Joshua Frank, and myself (and a journalist and a colleague, whose names I’ve redacted, who wrote to St. Clair for clarification after reading conflicting reports on the Internet), for the purposes of criticism and review. CounterPunch readers, my readers, and others who swim these rather rarefied waters can judge the facts, and the quality of everyone’s character (and our motives) for themselves.

I hope that readers will also take the time to peruse the links I’ve provided for reference, in particular my collegial exchange with Joshua Frank and Louis Proyect on the Facebook, and Diana Johnstone’s Consortium News piece. Smearing one’s critics is an ugly business, but it’s a widespread and often very effective business. It is not going out of style anytime soon. So it’s essential to understand how it works, and to maintain an attitude of healthy skepticism toward anything defamatory you hear about anyone … and to know how to respond if it happens to you.

Oh, and please feel free to share, tweet, re-post, re-blog, or otherwise disseminate this essay, regardless of your politics.

***

The following email exchanges took place on September 21, and 24 and 25, 2018. The emphasis (underlined) is mine. Otherwise, they are reproduced verbatim.

1.

Colleague: [sends St. Clair an image of my tweet to ask, “what’s going on?”]

Jeffrey St Clair: No idea. We didn’t stop running him. We missed one column, because I’d been out for most of the week attending to the new grandkid. God forbid, I take a week off in 5 years before some shithead begins slandering me online. In any event, he does publish his stuff on a site which just try to claim Alex as a “Holocaust denier,” so it’s not as if he’s going without an audience.

2.

Journalist: Has [CJ] really been kicked off CP? That’s what he seems to be saying.

Jeffrey St Clair: No. I know that’s what he’s saying, but it’s a lie and he knows it’s a lie. I told him as much and I had his piece for last week edited, loaded and scheduled to run when someone sent me his drama queen tweet. We didn’t publish a single piece, out of the dozens we’ve published, because it slipped past me while I was trying to take a little time off to enjoy the arrival of our first grandkid. It’s a simple as that.

John Ross used to get royally pissed at me for sometimes delaying running his pieces. He’d call Saul Landau from Mexico City and gripe and send me furious emails. But Ross never went public libeling CP editors for having overlooked one his essays. He’d never even consider it. But that’s because Ross was a real journalist, who’d been in the trenches for decades as Alex and I had, and was also on our side politically. The old notions of solidarity are, of course, withering away, while the state remains.

Alex used to say that we should reject every fourth or fifth submission from a writer just to keep them in their toes. I’ve never taken that position. It was an indulgence on my part to run Hopkins at all, since we’d had a fairly iron-clad rule against running satire since it always confuses the credulous readers of the site.

Even so, I think Hopkins’ public assault on us reveals something rather acidic about his character, almost as much as his preference to have his columns published by Ron Unz, the guy who funded the anti-immigrant and English-only ballot initiatives in California and who lately libeled Alex as a Holocaust denier–though, the coward that he is, Unz waited five years after Alex was in the ground to do so.

I don’t know what Hopkins’ real politics are and I don’t want to speculate. But I do know Unz’s politics and the circle that has coalesced around him, like Israel Shamir who publicly denounced me a couple of weeks ago for caring “more about blacks and Jews than white Christians.” I’ll cop to that smear, but not to CJ’s.

CJ Hopkins: Hi [REDACTED], and Jeff. [REDACTED], I’m not sure whether you’re inquiring personally or professionally, so with that in mind, here are the facts … and some of my thoughts.

I sent Jeff my recent Putin-Nazi Paranoia piece, waited for it to run. It didn’t. For the first time in over two years. So I wrote Jeff asking about it, specifically asking whether I had gone too far in my response to DiMaggio’s piece, in which DiMaggio had smeared a bunch of writers as “far right shills,” and supported his smear with a blog piece by Louis Proyect along the same lines, but crazier.

As both DiMaggio’s and Proyect’s smear pieces were focused on writers who write for Unz, or allow Unz to cross-post their essays (as I have for two years), and as Proyect had written me a nasty email fishing for comments for his piece, I considered myself part of the smeared group, though I was not named in either piece.

In any event, Jeff wrote me back, said he hadn’t seen my submission, that it had been a busy week, and that he would rummage around for it. I re-sent it to him immediately in order to spare him the rummaging. I waited for it to run. It didn’t. No follow-up from Jeff.

A week later, I sent my most recent piece, Down with the Working Classes! Waited for it to run. It didn’t. In the meantime, no word from Jeff or anyone at CP about the earlier piece.

So I posted the Working Classes piece on my blog, tweeted that CP had apparently stopped running my work and returning my emails, which is true. I did not claim that I was banned.

The background to this, on my side, is that I have watched as key CP writers, namely Litvin, Frank, Draitser, and then DiMaggio (and Proyect on his blog and elsewhere) have posted a series of paranoid pieces accusing people of being “Red-Brown” agents, or whatever. (You probably recall the “Caitlin Johnstone-is-a-Nazi” episode.) Long story short, the DiMaggio piece was the last straw for me. I wrote my Putin-Nazi Paranoia piece as a response. It was tough. I was angry. Which shouldn’t have surprised anyone.

If CP had run that piece (i.e., my response), that would have sufficed. I think I was entitled to that, after two years of contributing to CP, and otherwise supporting it, and after having been smeared in CP’s pages, in a lead essay, as a “far right shill.” Or, if Jeff or Joshua or anyone at CP had simply returned my emails and informed me why they had stopped running my essays, or accusing me of being a crypto-Nazi because I have let Unz re-post my pieces, or just telling me directly to go fuck myself, that would have also sufficed. But nothing.

This email is long enough, so I’ll spare you the details of my exchanges with Joshua and Louis on Facebook, and Jeff via email, other than to say they all seem to be obsessed with the Unz thing (which is surprising, since Unz has been reposting my stuff for two years) and suddenly very concerned about my “character.”

I think my character is pretty clear from my writing. I don’t appreciate the guilt-by-association game, or being smeared as a “far right shill,” and I simply don’t have any respect for folks who engage in that sort of thing. It appears to have become a standard tactic at CP, as you can see from Jeff’s reference to my “real politics” in his email.

As for my “public assaults” on CP, again, that could have been prevented with a simple email, which, where I come from, is just professional courtesy.

Anyway, [REDACTED], those are the facts and my thoughts. If you have further questions about what happened, or my “character” or my “real politics,” just ask. Despite the CP folks’ insinuations and smears, I’m really not a very sneaky guy.

Jeffrey St Clair: A favor: stop attacking Nat in your online self-promotions—“Read the article that Nat refused to run, blah blah blah.” He doesn’t make any editorial decisions. Train your pop-gun on me, instead. It will probably increase your hits with the Holocaust deniers and Pizzagaters you like to hang with, even as you demure that you ain’t one of them. The reason the “Unz thing” has became an issue is that he just smeared Cockburn as a Holocaust Denier—not so much “smeared,” I guess, as adopted & celebrated as one of the gang. Alex was my partner and best friend for 25 years. Maybe you think it’s funny. I don’t.

PS—For the sake of accuracy, even though I realize that’s not the domain of satirists, Litvin hasn’t written for CounterPunch in more than year because he doesn’t like our politics or the fact that we regularly run writers whose point of view he disagrees with.

CJ Hopkins: Sure, Jeff. Send me an official Twitter handle for CounterPunch that isn’t Nat and I’ll switch to that one. Until then, I’ll use the official CounterPunch handle that exists.

Thanks for making my point by insinuating that I’m anti-Semite, again, and that I share the politics of every outlet that re-posts my essays and am responsible for their behavior. My essays have been reposted by numerous outlets, left and right, which I assume you know. There’s a list of them on my website. I don’t work for or represent any of them.

I don’t think any of this is funny, in case you didn’t get that. If you want to purge CP of writers you suddenly decide are “far right shills” and publish smears of them, that’s your prerogative. If you thought I was going to go quietly, you’re probably not as good a judge of “character” as you think.

Jeffrey St Clair: Why would I know who you write for, CJ? And how would I know this? Am I supposed to have tracked you across the web? I know you advertise yourself as “America’s greatest satirist,” but, even though I think I’m a fairly well-read person, I’d never heard of you before one of your submissions showed up in my inbox, which I gladly ran and continued to do so for many, many months, whether I agreed with your pieces or not. Do you admit that is true or are you going concoct some contorted fabulation about that as well? If I had known that you’d been posting the same pieces we’d run on CP on Unz for two years (or other sites), we wouldn’t have run you on CounterPunch to begin with. Why the fuck would we? Putting aside the rancid nature of Unz’s site, we have too many writers—right, libertarian, left, green and anarchist—who want to write for us to run writers who are broadcasting the same piece across multiple venues. I’ve been libeled as an anti-Semite for 20 years at least and have been on the ADL and SPLC hit lists for nearly as long, so you’ll have to do better than that to get anyone who really knows the score to believe that we somehow gagged you because of your views on the Israel lobby or evicted you as part of some alleged purge of “rightwing” writers. Who are these poor victims? What are their names? Where can we send flowers? Josh and I both grew up among conservatives and we’ve always run conservatives on CounterPunch and published many essay by them in our books, from Imperial Crusades to Red State Rebels. I do draw the line at publishing racists. You don’t draw the line—apparently– about being published by them. I’ll be honest, if I knew that you’d continued publishing on Unz’s after he wrote his defense of Holocaust denialism that libeled Alex (and me, since one of the pieces he cited as “evidence” we co-wrote), I’d’ve asked you to quit publishing with him out of solidarity. But I didn’t realize that until after you’d thrown your public tantrum. I don’t know you at all, so I can make no assessment of your character, other than from the public lie you told about us having stopped running your writing. You can continue to project whatever bile you want about us, I just asked you politely to direct them and not my son, who makes none of the editorial decisions here—not that we even made one your case. You’ve declined to do that. I’m no dramatist, but I think that says something about your “character”.

CJ Hopkins: Dear Jeff, please show us all where I have once advertised myself as “America’s greatest satirist.” When you can’t, admit that you’re just making shit up because you’re angry.

You knew that other outlets re-posted my stuff. I asked you about that a long time ago, and you said it was no probem, as long as they credited CP. I’ve specifically mentioned at least two of them to you at different times, ColdType and Greanville Post. I have tweeted many of those other outlets’ reposts, regularly. All of my essays ran on CounterPunch first.

I don’t “draw the line” at being re-posted by anyone. If I did, I’d spend half my time trying to force people to remove my essays from their sites and blogs. I realize you are trying to draw me into a debate about Unz. That’s how the smear game works. I’m not going to bite. I have nothing to do with Unz, except that they re-post my pieces, as do many other sites, which I also have nothing to do with.

Regarding the Twitter handle, please be honest. You are referring to CounterPunch’s official Twitter handle, not Nat’s personal Twitter handle, which I have never used. I’m not going to stop tagging CounterPunch’s official (and, as far as I know, only) Twitter handle just because you chose to put Nat’s name on it.

I understand that you are angry and want to insult and belittle me. If you could just insult and belittle me without making shit up that I have to refute, that would save us both a lot of time.

Josh Frank: CJ, nobody is shedding a tear for you here, we take this shit personal when writers go public with their petty shit. And yes your whining that we didn’t run your piece was petty. Personally I am happy to see you go. It had nothing to do with your grievance about some link in an article to another article that didn’t even name you – which of course is petty. It’s more to do with the obvious thin skin you have. You can’t be a left writer and have thin skin, you won’t last long. But I guess you are proving the point.

Don’t let the door…

Jeffrey St Clair: “In house satirist”, excuse me, my mistake. All apologies.

If you told me you were running your stuff on other sites, I’ve long forgotten it. It’s certainly not something I’ve ever encouraged in the 20 years we’ve been online.

I’m not trying to draw you into a debate about anything. What’s to debate?

The only thing I’m angry about is the lie you continue to tell for your own self-promotion, I guess, that we abruptly stopped running your pieces for some reason of political correctness.

As for Nat, I see that he just retweeted, as he usually does, your ad for Consent Factory. (As I have also done many times. As I did your book, even advertising it on CP, as I recall.) So I guess you can spit invective (“the latest smear by Nat@counterpunch) in his direction, but it will be hitting the wrong mark. I’m sure there’ll be no acknowledgment of this generosity from you, because it wouldn’t fit your narrative of victimization.

As for you having “nothing to do with Unz,” [cites my tweet] “Here’s my latest leftist heresy, in the @UnzReview, which posts both far-left and far-right views. Unz has been reposting my @NatCounterPunch essays for years, but according to CP, I’m suddenly a fascist “shill” because I let them do so. Am I? You decide.”

It’s a quaintly neutral way to describe Unz, but he’s your publisher. Enjoy the ride.

CJ Hopkins: Dear Jeff, I’m happy to acknowledge everything you and CP have done for me. You ran everything I sent you for over two years, plugged my book, and me, often featured my pieces, at least early on. You more or less put me on the map in this gig, and I have been proud to be included in CP’s pages.

What you characterize as a “lie” is indeed my interpretation of events. I’ve detailed those events, and my interpretation of them, so I won’t waste our time doing it again.

The tweet you cited was sent after these events, and after Joshua and Proyect started smearing me on Facebook. I’m not going to sit idly by while CP’s Red-Brown hunters (or you for that matter) smear me, and insinuate that Unz is my publisher, or that I am somehow in cahoots with fascists and Holocaust deniers. Again, as I have stated several times already, I have nothing to do with Unz, nothing more than I do with ColdType, Greanville Post, Black Agenda Report, OffGuardian, ZeroHedge, Entelekheia, or any other outlet that has re-posted my stuff. The tweet was meant to spur readers to look at the facts and decide for themselves.

I am honestly sorry that you set up your official CP account with Nat’s name on the front of it. I have no wish to involve Nat in this. Unfortunately, that is CP’s official handle. So if I want to make reference to CP, that’s the one I have to use, until you change it.

I sense we’re coming to the end of this email exchange. I hope so. I won’t bother to reply to Joshua’s email, which was just spewing more bile, nothing substantive that requires a reply.

All best wishes for the future …

***

 

CJ Hopkins

September 29, 2018

[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.