C.J. Hopkins's Blog, page 20

The Ever More Orwellian Definition of Terrorism

In terms of twisting the English language into a ludicrous Orwellian mockery of itself in order to short circuit critical thinking, this has been a particularly good week. My favorite part so far has been the part where respectable leftists writers have been arguing that the already arbitrary application of the label “terrorist” should now be rendered even more arbitrary. I’m not talking about establishment liberals in corporatist papers like The New York Times. I’m talking writers who I generally respect, and fearless, adversarial outlets like The Intercept and CounterPunch.

For example, in his essay on Wednesday, The NRA’s Latest Terrorist Attack on U.S. Soil, Paul Street argues that the “terrorist” label should be applied, not just to the Las Vegas shooter, but also to the NRA. Here, I believe, is the crux of his argument:

“I am aware that the formal definition of terrorism involves the use of violence to achieve a political objective – a ruthless means to political ends(s). Does the actual shooter have to be a member of the terrorist organization – in this case, by my analysis, the NRA – and on board with its agenda? No, not when it comes to advancing the NRA’s political goals. All that’s required is that he kills a lot of people.”

This, of course, is the very same logic employed by the media and the intelligence community when they label any mass murdering psycho who claims to be part of some terrorist group that he has never had any contact with a “suddenly self-radicalized terrorist.” These would be folks like Omar Mateen, Mohamed Salmene Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, Khalid Masood, and assorted other killers, who I have personally designated “non-terrorist terrorists,” due to the inconvenient fact that they appear to have had no connection to terrorism prior to deciding to kill a lot of people. But whatever … according to Paul Street’s logic, and the logic of the “intelligence community,” a person doesn’t need to be a member of any actual terrorist group, or be otherwise connected to terrorism, to be officially designated a “terrorist.”

And if that kind of reasoning seems less than convincing, Binoy Kampmark, in his Wednesday essay, What’s in a Word? Terrorism in Las Vegas, offers the following justification for deeming the Las Vegas perpetrator a “terrorist”:

“The Nevada statute should have provided ample guidance to the authorities about what had transpired: ‘an act of terrorism means any act that involves the use or attempted use of sabotage, coercion or violence which is intended to cause great bodily harm or death to the general population.’ Down pat, precise, unquestionable.”

Well, gosh, if the legislature of the State of Nevada has passed a law enabling the authorities to designate any mass murderer a “terrorist,” I guess that should be good enough for us. Who can argue with the law, after all? Let’s all just pray that the Nevada legislature doesn’t declare some activist group that we happen to support “domestic terrorists” because they’re trying to “coerce the general population” by causing “bodily harm” to someone.

And it’s not just my fellow CounterPunch contributors who’ve been going, shall we say, a little overboard. Tim Dickenson, in his Rolling Stone piece, It’s Time to Politicize the Terror Attack in Las Vegas, reiterates Street and Kampmark’s arguments, or they reiterate his, or something. Shaun King, in a piece in The Intercept, The White Privilege of the ‘Lone Wolf ‘ Shooter, treats the subject with a bit more nuance, but the impression we are left with is basically the same; if not for the fact that the Las Vegas shooter was white, he would have been deemed a “terrorist.” Which is true, of course, but beside the point.

While I appreciate these writers’ frustration with the biased application of the “terrorist” label, helping the intelligence community expand the definition of “terrorist” to the point where they can just slap it onto anyone seems a bit reckless and … well, not so intelligent. It’s kind of like arguing that because the police have been killing unarmed African Americans, the thing to do is demand that they also start killing unarmed white Americans, you know, just to keep things fair. Call me what you want, but this isn’t an argument I can enthusiastically get behind. Apart from the blatant absurdity of it, and the naked authoritarianism of it, there’s also this hang up I have with words, i.e., how I want them to actually mean things.

Emotionally loaded terms like “terrorism” don’t mean anything. Their value is strategic. They are labels used by the ruling classes to designate violence that they haven’t sanctioned. When Trump, or Obama, orders a drone to bomb some wedding party in Afghanistan and vaporizes an entire family, or when the IDF kills another kid for throwing rocks at a wall or something, this violence does not qualify as terrorism. On the other hand, if some Muslim guy, who just happens to be struggling with his sexual preferences, decides to mass murder a lot of people, and glorify his murder/suicide by claiming he is doing it for ISIS … well, sure, that definitely qualifies as terrorism. And when the mother of some other idiot who goes to Syria to join the terrorists the CIA is helping try to overthrow the Syrian government wires her son a couple thousand Euros, she is sent to prison for “financing terrorism.” And then there is the current corporate effort to eliminate “extremist” views on the Internet, and the intelligence agencies’ classification of Antifa as “domestic terrorists.” These are just some of the many examples of how the ruling classes are using these terms (i.e, “terrorism,” “extremism,” etc.) to demonize anyone they want to demonize, and keep people living in a state of fear, so that they have no time for critical thinking, which is what these terms are designed to do.

And now, in response to the Las Vegas massacre, leftists are demanding that the perpetrator, Stephen Paddock, be labeled a “terrorist,” because he furthers the NRA’s political goals, or simply because he shot a lot of people. Well, sure, I mean, why the hell not? If we can argue that violence isn’t actual violence, because it’s preemptive self-defense against Nazis, whose speech is violence because they’re Nazis, we can probably get away with this one. And heck, why should we stop with Paddock? Couldn’t we, employing the same sort of logic, argue that every NRA member, and anyone who voted for Trump (who, after all, is a white supremacist and thus a terrorist by definition) … that all these people are also terrorists? Maybe, if we got enough Facebook likes, we could write to the Homeland Security folks and demand that they start up another terrorist database, or otherwise monitor these people’s behavior.

Or maybe I’m just over-reacting, and criticizing my fellow leftists unjustly. It probably doesn’t really matter what words like “terrorist” actually mean, or what kind of authoritarian sentiment or convoluted Orwellian logic we promote in our alternative left-wing essays. By the time that Google and Facebook get finished cleansing the Internet of “extremist content,” and “terrorist-related content,” and every other type of content they have demonized with some meaningless label designed to shut off critical thinking and appeal to people’s raw emotions, no one will be reading us anyway … except for the terrorists and extremists, of course.

CJ Hopkins

(first published in CounterPunch, October 6, 2017)

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our self-appointed political pundit and in-house satirist, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the views or opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its management, staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns.

PLEASE ALSO NOTE: If, for whatever inexplicable reasons, you appreciate the work of our in-house satirist, please go to his Patreon page and give him $1 a month, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices hitting our staff up for money.

Sympathy for the Corporatocracy

So, the good news is, we’ve somehow survived the first nine months of Donald Trump’s presidency. The bad news is, not only is the country now remotely controlled by Vladimir Putin, but it appears we’re finally on the verge of the all-out Russo-Nazi dictatorship the Resistance has, for over a year, been hysterically warning us would be the punishment for not electing Hillary Clinton. Things are definitely looking ominous.

As Charles Blow noted in The New York Times, Trump has discarded his mask of normalcy (which was never much of a mask to begin with), and has come out as openly white supremacist. Politico reports he might be assembling his personal Trumpian Sturmabteilung from the ranks of neo-Nazi militias. Another piece in The New York Times informs us of the allegedly possible coordination of the Trump regime with the “growing” and “dangerous” neo-Nazi movement, unless, of course, The Times duly notes, their Nazi source was just making stuff up. Out in Hollywood, liberal celebrities, neocons, and former spooks have formed a “Committee to Investigate Russia,” which presumably will be working closely with special counsel Robert Mueller, who is currently preparing to indict Paul Manafort for conspiring to offer to personally brief some Putin-friendly Russian oligarch he had allegedly stolen millions from … or something more or less like that. Meanwhile, Trump has been down in Alabama whipping his white supremacist followers into a mindless frenzy of racial hatred of African-American professional athletes (and other expressions of patriotism) in order to divide, confuse, and divert us while he secretly plots to torch the Capitol and blame it on “Antifa terrorists.” How did things ever get to this point?

Well … all right, let’s review what happened, or at least the official version of what happened. Not Hillary Clinton’s version of what happened, which Jeffrey St. Clair so incisively skewered, but the Corporatocracy’s version of what happened, which overlaps with but is even more ridiculous than Clinton’s ridiculous version. To do that, we need to harken back to the peaceful Summer of 2016, (a/k/a the “Summer of Fear”), when the United States of America was still a shiny city upon a hill whose beacon light guided freedom-loving people, the Nazis were still just a bunch of ass clowns meeting in each other’s mother’s garages, and Russia was, well … Russia was Russia.

Back then, as I’m sure you’ll recall, Western democracy, was still primarily being menaced by the lone wolf terrorists, for absolutely no conceivable reason, apart from the terrorists’ fanatical desire to brutally murder all non-believers. The global Russo-Nazi Axis had not yet reared its ugly head. President Obama, who, during his tenure, had single-handedly restored America to the peaceful, prosperous, progressive paradise it had been before George W. Bush screwed it up, was on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon slow jamming home the TPP. The Wall Street banks had risen from the ashes of the 2008 financial crisis, and were buying back all the foreclosed homes of the people they had fleeced with subprime mortgages. American workers were enjoying the freedom and flexibility of the new gig economy. Electioneering in the United States was underway, but it was early days. It was already clear that Donald Trump was literally the Second Coming of Hitler, but no one was terribly worried about him yet. The Republican Party was in a shambles. Neither Trump nor any of the other contenders had any chance of winning in November. Nor did Sanders, who had been defeated, fair and square, in the Democratic primaries, mostly because of his racist statements and crazy, quasi-Communist ideas. Basically, everything was hunky dory. Yes, it was going to be terribly sad to have to bid farewell to Obama, who had bailed out all those bankrupt Americans the Wall Street banks had taken to the cleaners, ended all of Bush and Cheney’s wars, closed down Guantanamo, and just generally served as a multicultural messiah figure to affluent consumers throughout the free world, but Hope-and-Change was going to continue. The talking heads were all in agreement … Hillary Clinton was going to be President, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

Little did we know at the time that an epidemic of Russo-Nazism had been festering just beneath the surface of freedom-loving Western societies like some neo-fascist sebaceous cyst. Apparently, millions of theretofore more or less normal citizens throughout the West had been infected with a virulent strain of Russo-Nazi-engineered virus, because they simultaneously began exhibiting the hallmark symptoms of what we now know as White Supremacist Behavioral Disorder, or Fascist Oppositional Disorder (the folks who update the DSM are still arguing over the official name). It started with the Brexit referendum, spread to America with the election of Trump, and there have been a rash of outbreaks in Europe, like the one we’re currently experiencing in Germany. These fascistic symptoms have mostly manifest as people refusing to vote as instructed, and expressing oppressive views on the Internet, but there have also been more serious crimes, including several assaults and murders perpetrated by white supremacists (which, of course, never happened when Obama was President, because the Nazis hadn’t been “emboldened” yet).

Now, despite what the Russian propagandists will tell you, this recent outbreak of fascistic behavior has nothing whatsoever to do with these people’s frustration with neoliberalism or the supranational Corporatocracy that has been expanding its global empire with total impunity for twenty-five years. And it definitely has nothing at all to do with supranational political unions, or the supersession of national sovereignty by corporate-concocted “free trade” agreements, or the relentless privatization of everything, or the fear that a lot of people have that their cultures are being gradually erased and replaced with a globalized, corporate-friendly, multicultural, market-based culture, which is merely a simulation of culture, and which contains no actual cultural values (because exchange value is its only operative value), but which sells the empty signifiers of their eviscerated cultural values back to them so they can wear their “identities” like designer brands as they hunch together in silence at Starbucks posting pictures of themselves on Facebook.

No, this discontent with the political establishment, corporate elites, and the mainstream media has nothing to do with any of that. It’s not like global Capitalism, following the collapse of the U.S.S.R. (its last external ideological adversary), has been restructuring the entire planet in accordance with its geopolitical interests, or doing away with national sovereignty, and other nationalistic concepts that no longer serve a useful purpose in a world where a single ideological system (one backed by the most fearsome military in history) reigns completely unopposed. If that were the case, well, it might behoove us to question whether this outbreak of Nazism, racism, and other forms of “hate,” was somehow connected to that historical development … and maybe even try to articulate some sort of leftist analysis of that.

This hypothetical leftist analysis might want to focus on how Capitalism is fundamentally opposed to Despotism, and is essentially a value-decoding machine which renders everything and everyone it touches essentially valueless interchangeable commodities whose worth is determined by market forces, rather than by societies and cultures, or religions, or other despotic systems (wherein values are established and enforced arbitrarily, by the despot, the church, or the ruling party, or by a group of people who share an affinity and decide they want to live a certain way). This is where it would get sort of tricky, because it (i.e., this hypothetical analysis) would have to delve into the history of Capitalism, and how it evolved out of medieval Despotism, and how it has been decoding despotic values for something like five hundred years. This historical delving (which would probably be too long for people to read on their phones) would demonstrate how Capitalism has been an essentially progressive force in terms of getting us out of Despotism (which, for most folks, wasn’t very much fun) by fomenting bourgeois revolutions and imposing some semblance of democracy on societies. It would follow Capitalism’s inexorable advance all the way up to the Twentieth Century, in which its final external ideological adversary, fake Communism, suddenly imploded, delivering us to the world we now live in … a world where a single ideology rules the planet unopposed from without, and where any opposition to that global ideology can only be internal, or insurgent, in nature (e.g, terrorism, extremism, and so on). Being a hypothetical leftist analysis, it would, at this point, need to stress that, despite the fact that Capitalism helped deliver us from Despotism, and improved the state of society generally (compared to most societies that preceded it), we nonetheless would like to transcend it, or evolve out of it toward some type of society where people, and everything else, including the biosphere we live in, are not interchangeable, valueless commodities exchanged by members of a global corporatocracy who have no essential values, or beliefs, or principles, other than the worship of money. After having covered all that, we might want to offer more a nuanced view of the current neo-nationalist reaction to the Corporatocracy’s ongoing efforts to restructure and privatize the rest of the planet. Not that we would support this reaction, or in any way refrain from calling neo-nationalism what it is (i.e., reactionary, despotic, and doomed), but this nuanced view we’d hypothetically offer, by analyzing the larger sociopolitical and historical forces at play, might help us to see the way forward more clearly, and … who knows, maybe eventually propose some kind of credible leftist alternative to the “global neoliberalism vs. neo-nationalism” double bind we appear to be hopelessly stuck in at the moment.

Luckily, we don’t have to do that (i.e., articulate such a leftist analysis of any such larger historical forces). Because there is no corporatocracy … not really. That’s just a fake word the Russians made up and are spreading around on the Internet to distract us while the Nazis take over. No, the logical explanation for Trump, Brexit, and anything else that threatens the expansion of global Capitalism, and the freedom, democracy, and prosperity it offers, is that millions of people across the world, all at once, for no apparent reason, woke up one day full-blown fascists and started looking around for repulsive demagogues to swear fanatical allegiance to. Yes, that makes a lot more sense than all that complicated stuff about history and hegemonic ideological systems, which is probably just Russian propaganda anyway, in which case there is absolutely no reason to read any boring year-old pieces, like this one in The European Financial Review, or this report by Corporate Watch, from way back in the year 2000, about the rise of global corporate power.

So, apologies for wasting your time with all that pseudo-Marxian gobbledygook. Let’s just pretend this never happened, and get back to more important matters, like statistically proving that Donald Trump got elected President because of racism, misogyny, transphobia, xenophobia, or some other type of behavioral disorder, and pulling down Confederate statues, or kneeling during the National Anthem, or whatever happens to be trending this week. Oh, yeah, and debating punching Nazis, or people wearing MAGA hats. We definitely need to sort all that out before we can move ahead with helping the Corporatocracy remove Trump from office, or at least ensure he remains surrounded by their loyal generals, CEOs, and Goldman Sachs guys until the next election. Whatever we do, let’s not get distracted by that stuff I just distracted you with. I know, it’s tempting, but, given what’s at stake, we need to maintain our laser focus on issues related to identity politics, or else … well, you know, the Nazis win.

CJ Hopkins

(first published in CounterPunch, September 26, 2017)

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our self-appointed political pundit and in-house satirist, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the views or opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its management, staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns.

PLEASE ALSO NOTE: If, for whatever inexplicable reasons, you appreciate the work of our in-house satirist, please go to his Patreon page and give him $1 a month, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices hitting our staff up for money.

The United States of Manufactured Hysteria

Thank God for the Charlottesville Nazis! For a moment there, it was looking like we were actually going to have a few days to stop and reflect on the state of America without being subjected to some new form of manufactured mass hysteria. Seriously, just a few short weeks ago, as the corporatist ruling classes’ ridiculous attempt to convince the world that Donald Trump is some sort of Russian sleeper agent appeared to be finally fizzling out, a significant number of leftist types were beginning to wonder if maybe, just maybe, the fact that the United States government is controlled by a global corporate plutocracy that has no allegiance to any nation, or people, or to anything other than itself, and that is in the process of demonizing and potentially deposing an elected president … that maybe that might be something to focus on, not exclusively, by any means, but alongside other vital issues, like defending the rights of transgender drone pilots and purging syllabi of oppressive pronouns.

Fortunately, thanks to the Nazis of Charlottesville, this dangerous moment of doubt has now passed. If you were listening closely on August 11, you could hear the collective sigh of relief whooshing out of Resistance quarters like a hypnagogic idiot wind as roughly one hundred white supremacists marched into town with their tiki torches barking N.S.D.A.P. slogans and otherwise making asses of themselves. Corporate media apparatchiks, mandarins of the Internet Left, professional and amateur Naziologists, and assorted other Nazi experts immediately went to DEFCON 1, signaling imminent Nazi invasion. Photos of bug-eyed, torch-bearing Nazis, their mouths wide open in mid-Nazi shriek, veins bulging out of their Nazi necks, were released to the public and circulated widely. Millions of conflicted leftists (many of whom had been feeling uneasy about collaborating with the corporate plutocracy in their efforts to delegitimize Trump, and every last American who voted for him), upon seeing glossy, color close-ups of these Nazis waved in front of their faces, responded as every Good American has been conditioned to respond since early childhood. They instantly switched off their critical faculties and began reenacting the Second World War … or rather, the mythical version of it wherein the USA defeated the Nazis, which is one of Americans’ favorite pastimes.

Look, I don’t mean to make light of Charlottesville. We’re talking actual neo-Nazis, with actual Nazi flags and haircuts, shouting actual Nazi slogans, and the Ku Klux Klan, and heavily-armed militia, and just garden variety racist rednecks … all of which have been standard features of American life for decades, and longer, but this is no time to reflect on history, or try to put things into perspective. Also, one of these Nazi morons ran over people with his car the next day, killing one woman, and injuring many others, which renders any critical thinking about the actual size of the Nazi menace (which remains ridiculously small, as ever) or the motives of the corporate media in blowing it up all out of proportion tantamount to Nazi sympathizing, and I’m already in enough trouble as it is.

Plus, Charlottesville was just the beginning … kind of like a Nazi Tet Offensive. Just one week later, on August 19, literally forty to fifty Nazis (cleverly disguised as Trump supporters, libertarians, and right-wing oddballs) occupied a public gazebo in Boston, and were right on the verge of expressing virulent Nazi views to the cops surrounding them. Luckily, just in the nick of time, a contingent of approximately forty thousand anti-fascist Resistance members arrived on the scene to deny them a platform, and chase down anyone wearing one of those MAGA hats and verbally abuse them.

You’d think the Nazis would have gotten the message … but no, last Sunday, August 27, another ten or eleven Nazis (many of them posing as “Trump supporters,” as if that didn’t make them Nazis, and some of them even going so far as to attempt to pass themselves off as “Latinos”) audaciously tried to assemble in Berkeley. The Resistance showed them no mercy this time. Thousands of peaceful counter-protesters quickly frightened the Nazis away, then squads of masked-up anti-fascists hunted down any Nazi-looking stragglers, “apparent alt-righters,” and nosy photographers, and stomped the living Hitler out of them. This alarmed the more liberal Resistance, which set about branding the anti-fascists who beat the crap out of the folks the liberals had branded Nazis “domestic terrorists.”

Elsewhere in America, Resistance members were frantically tearing down Confederate monuments, which had suddenly become intolerably offensive, and searching through online business directories for anyone named after Robert E. Lee, or horses named after General Lee’s horse, or the horses of other racist Nazis. That, and hastily organizing the upcoming March to Confront White Supremacy (presumably in order to make a mockery of the 1963 March on Washington), and penning lengthy explications of the evils of racism, white supremacy, and all other forms of Naziism associated with Donald Trump … and otherwise whipping people up into a sputtering frenzy of Nazi hysteria.

Now, you have to hand it to the fake Resistance … this Nazi hysteria is good for everyone. Not only is it an easier sell than that ridiculous Russian hacking nonsense (because Trump really is a racist, of course), but it’s something the broader Left can embrace, as it plugs straight into identity politics, which is pretty much all we’ve got these days.

See, up to now, the dilemma we’ve been facing (or some of us have been facing, anyway) is how to respond to the ruling establishment’s concerted campaign to “regime-change” Trump. On the one hand, Trump is a living embodiment of everything the Left opposes. On the other hand, going after Trump has meant carrying water for the fake Resistance, i.e., that global corporatocracy (which, by the way, does not mean “the Jews.” I always like to slip that in to piss off my anti-Semitic readers.) This has been a bit awkward for some of us, restraining our impulse to stick it to Trump (at least on whatever talking points the Resistance is currently putting out) because in doing so we would align ourselves with the ruling establishment’s attempt to demonize, and eventually depose an American president who isn’t playing ball with them properly. If we oppose regime change in other countries, shouldn’t we also oppose it at home? Or do the ruling classes get a pass this time because Trump is such an exceptional monster? But wait … wasn’t Saddam a monster? And Gaddafi? And all the other “Hitlers” that wouldn’t play ball with the corporatocracy? And Assad? Isn’t he a monster?

You can see how confusing all this gets … when you’re trying to figure out how to oppose both the supranational corporatocracy that is superseding sovereign nations as the hegemonic power in the world and the neo-nationalist reaction against it, which is essentially fascist in nature, and which the corporatocracy also opposes … and desperately wants you to help them oppose by buying their manufactured hysteria about Russians, or Nazis, or whatever scary monster they wave in front of your face. After a while, your brain starts to hurt, and you just want someone to make things simple.

Charlottesville Nazis to the rescue! How much simpler could it possibly get? Corporatocracy? What corporatocracy? We got goddamned Nazis coming out of the woodwork! Racist Nazis! Confederate Nazis! Nazi apologists! Nazi sympathizers! This is no time to worry about who’s actually wielding political power, or how they’re manufacturing hysteria and otherwise manipulating people (not you, of course … other people). No, what we need to do now is censor the Internet, and other venues for Nazi hate speech, and round up all these racist Nazis and subject them to anti-Nazi therapy, or anti-racist empathy programs, or just gang up on them and beat them senseless.

OK, sure, that might sound extreme, or authoritarian, or just plain old creepy, but keep in mind that This Is Not Normal! And racism and Naziism is very, very bad. And Love Trumps Hate! And Scope Kills Germs! And we never literally meant that Trump was an actual Russian agent or anything. Forget about all that Russia stuff now. Trump is Hitler. Trump has always been Hitler. America has always been at war with Hitler. America will always be at war with Hitler.

Oh, yeah, and I almost forgot, today’s edition of the Two Minutes Hate will begin in approximately fifteen minutes. Please assemble in the usual location. Thank you for your cooperation.

CJ Hopkins

(first published in CounterPunch, September 1, 2017)

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our self-appointed political pundit and in-house satirist, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the views or opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its management, staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns.

PLEASE ALSO NOTE: If, for whatever inexplicable reasons, you appreciate the work of our in-house satirist, please go to his Patreon page and give him $1 a month, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices hitting our staff up for money.

A De-Putin-Nazification of America Update

So the de-Putin-Nazification of America couldn’t be going much better at the moment. In terms of emotionally manipulating people (and especially any heretofore wayward members of the American “left”) into forming a mindless, hysterical mob and running around like headless chickens branding anyone who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton a goose-stepping Nazi, this past week has been a huge success. At this point, if you haven’t yet posted an anti-Nazi loyalty oath on Twitter, Facebook, or some other platform, you’re a potential “Nazi sympathizer” … and you don’t want to be one of those, now do you? No, I didn’t think you did. So, if you haven’t done that, you’d better get on it. Here are few tips to get you started.

Your anti-Nazi loyalty oath should include a clearly-worded statement acknowledging that Donald Trump is Hitler, or at least the leader of the tens of hundreds of imbecilic, neo-Nazi losers who, according to most of the mainstream media, are on the verge of overthrowing the entire American ruling establishment. It should also include a threat to unfollow, de-friend, and otherwise socially ostracize anyone who hasn’t posted such an oath, or who, despite the Charlottesville Kristallnacht, stubbornly continues thinking critically, or maintains any form of historical awareness, or presents any kind of rational arguments challenging the prevailing Nazi hysteria.

It should also include one or more of the following:

(1) If not an outright call for the First Amendment to be repealed, then at least a demand for a ban on “hate speech,” and the removal of every hate-based statue, flag, painting, book, film, song, joke, or other expression of racism, hatred, religious bigotry, misogyny, extremism, general rudeness (and any other forms of speech or expression that you don’t like) from public view. Don’t worry about the ramifications of this ban. It will never, ever, be used against you, or anyone that you agree with, or against any authors or artists that you like. It’ll be a ban on “hate-speech,” after all, and it’s not like that term is completely subjective, or subject to the whims of those in power, or anything like that.

(2) A demand that the already overly-broad definition of “terrorism” now be expanded even further, to include the fascist who drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters in Charlottesville, killing one and wounding many others. Never mind that this murderous idiot seems to have done this on the spur of the moment (or, if it was a planned attack, that he’s even more of an idiot than he seems, which, judging from his mug shot, is hard to believe). The important thing is to help the Resistance expand the definition of “terrorism” to the point where they can slap it onto anyone. Again, don’t worry about the ramifications. The “terrorist” label will never, ever, be used against groups that you approve of, or innocent people in faraway countries that some future president wants to murder with drones. The Resistance would never, ever, do that. They know who is and who isn’t a terrorist. And if they don’t, they can always check with Obama.

(3) A reference (either veiled or direct) to someone who may be a Nazi-sympathizer. This is crucial in terms of motivating others to post their loyalty oaths, and fostering an atmosphere of paranoia, which is always so helpful at times like this. Surely, you know of someone who has said, tweeted, published, or posted something that could be interpreted as “Nazi-friendly.” Don’t bother with the Trump supporters. The corporate-owned media will take care of them. You want to go after other leftists, specifically leftists who have been reluctant to call Trump Hitler, or a Putinist agent, or who disagree with you about Syria, or, you know, just people who get on your nerves. This is a golden opportunity to pore through their tweets and Facebook posts, find something you can use against them, and then accuse them of harboring Nazi sympathies. Given the current level of hysteria, few people are going to check your facts. This is one you can really have fun with. See how far you can push the paranoia. Make up elaborate conspiracy theories. If you’re not quite sure how to go about that, check The New York Times or The Washington Post … they’re masters of that kind of thing.

Your anti-Nazi loyalty oath should definitely not include any of the following:

(1) Any mention of the Ukrainian Nazis that Obama, Clinton, and the rest of the Resistance (before it was the Resistance, of course) helped regime-change the Ukrainian government when it wouldn’t play ball with the EU and NATO. Mentioning the Resistance’s support of these Nazis would only confuse those reading your oath, who might not understand that there are good Nazis and bad Nazis, and who have probably forgotten how the US government smuggled a number of actual Nazis (i.e., members of the NSDAP) into America after WWII … or how, since the end of that war, the United States has mass murdered countless millions of people all over the planet (but, technically, not in a genocidal fashion, so that doesn’t make us the same as Nazis).

(2) Actual membership figures on neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups, because those figures are pathetically small. Doing this would make your loyalty oath (not to mention the whole Nazi hysteria thing, generally) seem, if not paranoid, then at least absurd, or like part of some manufactured effort to whip up support for a ruling class coup by waving Nazis in front of everyone’s faces. This would be extremely counterproductive. Remember, one of the primary goals of the De-Putin-Nazification program is to convince the public that Richard Spencer (and the handful of other insignificant idiots that the corporate media is showering with publicity) is about to lead an overwhelming force of tiki torch-bearing neo-Nazis into the streets of American cities to battle the hyper-militarized police, the national guard, and the US military, or some other preposterous scenario like that.

(3) Any reference whatsoever to the corporatocracy that runs the country, and that normally decides who can run for president, and which is currently making an example of Trump in order to dissuade any future billionaires from having the audacity to fuck with them. You’ll be better off avoiding this subject entirely, as it only reminds folks how screwed they are, and how, odds are, they’re probably all worked up about something the corporate-owned media wanted to get them all worked up about, neo-Nazis, Russian hackers, nuclear war with North Korea, Syrian gas attacks, lone wolf terrorists, weapons of mass destruction, or whatever. Take it from someone who’s worked in show business. No one likes being made aware of how they are being manipulated … or provided with a binary set of officially acceptable contextual parameters within which they can think and speak.

But don’t worry too much about that binary stuff. There’ll be plenty of time to get into all that after we rid the world of these Nazis, and these racists, and all these Confederate statues. And Trump, of course. That’s the main thing … getting rid of Donald Trump, and getting a Democrat back in office. Oh, yeah … and the books. We need to look at the books. God knows how many Confederate books are still out there in the public libraries, and in people’s homes, where children can read them. We’ll need to get to the books eventually.

In the meantime, focus on Priority One. Go hard on the Nazi hysteria, at least throughout the rest of the weekend, after which they’ll probably need to switch us back to the Russia hysteria, or possibly the North Korea hysteria, or … damn, see? Here I go with that contextual parameter stuff again. I’ve really got to stop doing that. The last thing I need is to get myself accused of being some kind of Nazi sympathizer, or Confederate apologist, or Russian propagandist, or extremist, or terrorist, or, you know … whatever.

CJ Hopkins

(first published in CounterPunch, August 18, 2017)

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our self-appointed political pundit and in-house satirist, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the views or opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its management, staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns.

The De-Putin-Nazification of America

Sometime circa late July, as the hundreds of thousands of de facto vassals that cater to the needs of New York City’s simulated aristocracy were navigating the sweltering hell that the subway system has recently become, approximately one hundred miles to the east, deep in the heart of Resistance territory, where villas rent for up to a million a month, members of the notorious Bridgehampton Cell of the Neoliberal Liberation Army were gathered in one of their luxury safehouses, vetting the latest leading candidate for the coveted position of “resistance leader.”

California Senator Kamala Harris, multimillionaire woman of the people, and friend of rapacious banks like OneWest, must have impressed the Bridgehampton Cell, because their comrades in corporate-owned media immediately launched a propaganda campaign to get the word out to the American people (who’ve been suffering under occupation for going on the last seven months) that the Senator and her affluent backers represent their last best hope of overthrowing the Trumpian Reich and saving the world from the Putin-Nazis.

For those unfamiliar with the Putin-Nazis, it’s an official term I recently made up to describe, not just the Russian Federation, and Vladimir Putin and his inner circle, but also the maleficent global alliance of Russian hackers, Russian propagandists, Russian diplomats, Russian businesspersons, persons married to Russian persons, persons with Russian-sounding names, neo-Nazis, alt-right geeks, Goldman Sachs guys, Sandernistas, Corbynistas, former coal miners, hillbilly oxycodone addicts, socialists, anarchists, Black Lives Matterists, the ghost of George Carlin, the ACLU, and anyone who has ever retweeted Wikileaks or didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton.

As I’m sure you’ll recall, the Putin-Nazis originally materialized out of thin air around the time that Clinton was managing to lose the US presidential election to a repulsive, jabbering, narcissistic clown with absolutely no political experience, who the mainstream media had been assuring the world for months was the Second Coming of Hitler. Given that it was virtually impossible for Clinton to lose to such a noxious buffoon, the only rational explanation was that the Russians had somehow “hacked” the election, or “interfered with,” or “influenced” the election. They had done this by getting their hands on a batch of internal Democratic Party emails, passing them on to Putin-Nazi Propaganda Minister Julian Assange, who published them on the Internet, where they were read by former Obama-voters, who were so completely shocked by their contents that they decided not to vote for Clinton, as they had obviously been intending to do, until their minds got “interfered with.”

The rest, as they say, is history. On January 20, despite the fact that everyone knew that the entire Trump family were Putin-Nazi “sleeper” agents, and that the man himself was the Glorious Leader of an underground army of neo-Nazis numbering in the tens of hundreds that was threatening the very fabric of democracy by circulating cartoon frogs on the Internet, Donald J. Trump was sworn in as President, and the Trumpian Reich officially began.

Fortunately, Americans are not a bunch of Camembert-slurping surrender monkeys. Although the ruling establishment was bound by law to allow a neo-fascist dictator who was clearly working for a hostile foreign power to move his circus into the White House, they were hardly going to sit idly by and watch as he transformed America into some sort of neo-nationalist dystopia where grade-school children would be forced to learn Russian, Hitler-salute the confederate flag, and whatever other Russo-Nazi horrors he and Bannon had in mind. Before Trump could even order the removal of every likeness of Martin Luther King from the D.C. metropolitan area, the Democratic Party, patriotic Republicans, the Intelligence Community, the corporate-owned media, and, of course, just millions of Good Americans launched a grassroots resistance movement to remove him from office by any means necessary.

Seven months later, here we are, with a Special Counsel and a D.C. grand jury, who will certainly be able to find something on Trump, or at least ensure that he spends the rest of his term denying the stream of allegations, rumors, and leaks that will flow therefrom. Which means it’s time to start getting ready for the day when our national nightmare is over, and Kamala Harris (or whichever loyal figurehead the ruling classes ultimately choose) marches through Washington like Charles de Gaulle, presumably with the Obamas and Clintons in tow, after which the USA can continue to bomb, occupy, sanction, and otherwise destabilize various other countries, allow its banks to debt-enslave its citizens, maintain a brutal, militarized police force, and everything else it’s doing at the moment, but in a normal, liberal, non-fascist manner, and Stephen Colbert can get back to comedy.

Now, to pull this off, the Resistance is going to need to deal with these Putin-Nazis, specifically the Putin-Nazis on the Left, who are already tweeting “fake news” tweets impugning the character of Senator Harris (who happens to be black, and a woman, by the way … not that that has anything to do with anything, of course), and reminding Americans how they got bamboozled by Obama’s Hope-and-Change routine. These people need to be de-Putin-Nazified, and they need to be de-Putin-Nazified immediately. The last thing the Resistance needs at this point is to go through all the trouble of regime-changing Trump, only to have Americans elect some other non-vetted, narcissistic billionaire who thinks it might be fun to run for president.

This de-Putin-Nazification Program is going to involve a concerted effort on the part of the entire neoliberal establishment to stigmatize anyone who voted for Trump, or who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton, or who questions the integrity of Kamala Harris (who, as I may have already mentioned, is black), as a bug-eyed, Sieg-heiling Putin-Nazi. These people are going to need to be shamed, guilt-tripped, and otherwise emotionally manipulated into keeping their Putin-Nazi mouths shut. This isn’t going to work on your actual fascists, but it will work on nearly everyone else, or at least on those Obama voters who didn’t turn out for Hillary Clinton, and those bitter white Bernie Bros who voted for Trump as personal “fuck you” to the Democratic Party.

See, odd as this is going to sound, the majority of your Putin-Nazis don’t see themselves as Putin-Nazis. They see themselves, well, as just regular Americans who have lost all faith in the electoral system, and who believe they are living in a sham republic controlled by global corporations and obscenely wealthy individuals who couldn’t care less about them and their families, and whose only allegiance is to a transnational class of corporatist leeches like themselves. Still, despite their cynical beliefs, most of these folks are not particularly fond of being likened to Nazis, or racists, or xenophobes, or useful idiots. So this is exactly what the Resistance is doing, and intends to keep doing for the next few years (i.e., calling their detractors bad names, basically), so that any anti-corporatist dissent that they can’t get Google to make disappear with an “anti-fake news algorithm” can be stigmatized as racist, misogynist, or some other variation of “deplorable.”

Now, they need our help to make this work (yes, even CounterPunch readers can contribute to this vital effort). Don’t worry about the Russia hysteria. The corporate-owned media will take care of that. You want to focus on the fascism aspect, and the racism, misogyny, and xenophobia stuff, which is always the best way to silence other leftists. Here are a few simple things you can do.

(1) Exaggerate the neo-fascist threat! You can do this on Twitter and Facebook endlessly. Forget about the fact that the number of actual fascists in America is ridiculously small, and that odds of some sort of fascist takeover of the US government are infinitesimal. Convince your friends and Twitter followers that the fascists are on the verge of launching a national fascist revolution. Tweet about their “leaders” as if they were actual players on the national political stage, and not just a handful of pathetic creeps parading around in their Hitler hairdos for two or three hundred other such creeps. The point here is to help the Resistance keep folks’ attention focused on “the fascists,” and the racists, misogynists, xenophobes, et al., and not on the global capitalist elites and the vast transnational corporations that currently control most Western governments.

(2) Hammer the identity politics! Do not miss an opportunity to call out anyone who accidentally writes, speaks, or otherwise disseminates a word or phrase that oppresses anyone, or that displays any type of unacknowledged privilege. Not only will this help the Resistance keep folks divided into an ever-increasing number of powerless little sub-groups that pose no threat to the corporatist ruling classes, it will feel really good to self-righteously hector anyone whose values are different from yours, especially members of the working classes who couldn’t afford to go to university and learn about intersectionality, and so on. These folks are virtually fascists anyway. What difference does it make if you alienate them?

(3) Now, this one is absolutely crucial. Keep comparing Trump to Hitler! If you don’t have time for the other two, at least you can help the Resistance with this one. See, it’s really important that folks believe that Trump is not just a random bozo who rode a wave of populist anger and distrust of the Democrats into the White House, and who is now in the process of being neutralized by the people who actually run the country. He needs to be seen as a powerful dictator, who at any moment is liable to start … well, you know, killing the Jews, or something. Plus, this dovetails with the other two points. Exaggerating the fascist threat works much better when you have a powerful Hitler figure you can wag your finger at. And, given that Trump is actually a bigot, and a misogynist pig, and a xenophobe (or at least he plays one on TV), you can have a field day with the identity politics. So go hard on the Hitler stuff, and any kind of German references you can think of. Spell his name “Drumpf,” or call him “Herr Trump,” or put a little Hitler-mustache on him. Don’t worry about getting chastised by any intersectionalist purity freaks. These kinds of slurs are perfectly acceptable, because, as every Good American knows, the Germans are, and will always be, Nazis.

These are just a few ideas to get started with. I’m sure you can think up some more on your own. The main thing is to steer well clear of any kind of political analysis that reminds folks about that corporatocracy, or how much it costs to get elected to office, and where the majority of that money comes from, and thus how irrelevant electoral politics is.

Oh, and keep an eye out for those Putin-Nazis! You never know where they’re going to turn up, and I’d hate to see your mind get “interfered with.”

CJ Hopkins

(first published in CounterPunch, August 11, 2017)

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our self-appointed political pundit and in-house satirist, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the views or opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its management, staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns.

Intersectionalist Internet Blues

Over the course of last week, while I was simultaneously recovering from having a Bubble Yum-sized chunk of flesh cut out of my left ass cheek in a surgical clinic down the street from David Bowie’s old apartment in Berlin and mentally and physically preparing to have a six-foot long camera-equipped probe shoved up my rectum and into my large intestine by an all-female team of cheerful German gastroenterologists (neither of which unpleasant procedures had anything etiological to do with the other), a limited exchange of tactical nuclear opinion pieces took place among the American Left. I discovered this early Friday morning, having staggered back home from the aforementioned probing, and having spent the entire preceding night ingesting some type of industrial-strength laxative and eight liters of water on an empty stomach in order to prompt my digestive system to violently evacuate my large intestine (which, by that time, had already been thoroughly evacuated by an initial round of laxative guzzling), when I pulled up CounterPunch and found this piece by Jeffrey St. Clair on the brouhaha in question.

It started with this piece by Yoav Litvin accusing the self-proclaimed “rogue journalist” Caitlin Johnstone of “promoting racists” and “calling for cooperation with fascists,” which, whatever your opinion of Johnstone’s writing, and giving Litvin the benefit of the doubt, is a sloppy misreading of her work at best. Johnstone, who is essentially a provocateur, has built a considerable Internet following by publishing humorous, sensationalist pieces attacking mainstream media propaganda, neoliberals, neoconservatives, and generally being “an angry prophet denouncing the hypocrisies of our age,” which, good for her, as far as that goes. I often find her rants pretty funny, but then I don’t regard them as any kind of serious political philosophy or anything. As St. Clair noted in his piece, Johnstone tends to frame her polemics in a “We’re All Going to Die in a Nuclear Holocaust Unless We Unite Against the Deep State Now!” narrative, which generally makes for solid entertainment (it’s the plotline of Game of Thrones, for example), and is good for amassing an Internet following, but is not that useful when it comes to actually understanding what the American Left, such as it is, is up against. Personally, I enjoyed her earlier pieces attacking mainstream media propaganda more than the Call-to-Battle-Against-the-Deep-State pieces she’s been publishing recently … but if you’re going to be “an angry prophet denouncing the hypocrisies of our age,” you need to get folks off their sofas and shouting out of their windows somehow, and she seems to be doing pretty well at that.

In any event, Litvin’s piece, and this one by Joshua Frank that followed (both of which pieces, incidentally, were primarily criticizing David Cobb and the Greens for promoting Johnstone’s work), and this response from Johnstone and Cobb, set off the predictable Twitter storm, and exchange of third-party Medium posts, and presumably more of the same on Facebook, and probably other virtual quarters of LeftistWorld that I’m unaware of. By Monday morning (CET), Johnstone fans and members of the Progressive Army (and before you google it, yes, this is their actual name) were furiously debating the meaning of words like “collaborate,” “alignment,” and “white supremacy,” and whether Mike Cernovich is “alt-right” or “alt-light,” or some other brand of fascist idiot. In case you’re unfamiliar with Cernovich, he’s a pathetic, slimy Internet huckster in the mold of the repulsive character Tom Cruise played in the film Magnolia, except without a shred of charisma. It was Johnstone naming Cernovich as an example of someone on the so-called “Right” she could work with to overthrow the Deep State in time to save the entire world from imminent nuclear holocaust that started all this nonsense in the first place. (If you have a few minutes of your life to waste, have a look at this YouTube video, after which I think you’ll decide you’d probably rather collaborate with the polyp I just had removed from my colon than Cernovich, or anyone of his ilk.)

Why, you’re probably asking at this point, should you give a damn about some kind of internecine squabble among a marginal group of journalists most folks have never heard of and who have very little influence on anything? Well, mostly because the underlying issue (i.e., the one that Johnstone was trying to raise, which has now, of course, been completely eclipsed by the question of exactly what kind of asshole everyone who disagrees with someone who favorited someone’s retweet is) is actually an issue that needs to be discussed, which I fully intend to do … eventually.

First, I want to return to where I started, to that all-night industrial laxative ritual, and that team of cheerful gastroenterologists, and Dr. Drechsler, the surgeon who chopped a cyst out of my ass the week before. See, here in Germany, even an impoverished immigrant writer like myself can, in the space of one week (which time-line I don’t recommend, by the way), visit a GP several times, undergo surgery, and get a colonoscopy without wiping out his paltry savings to satisfy an Obamacare deductible or loading up his credit card with debt. I’m talking about universal healthcare, of course … and I’m not even talking single-payer. In Germany, the government funds approximately seventy-seven percent of the healthcare system. Most folks have state-subsidized insurance. Premiums and doctors fees are regulated. Prescriptions are cheap. You get the picture. The point is, everyone can access healthcare, as much as they need, without going bankrupt. See, providing affordable healthcare to everyone really isn’t that hard to accomplish. It could be easily achieved in the USA, given enough concerted pressure from people on, you guessed it, both the Left and Right, if they could hold off demonizing each other for two seconds.

Imagine a national political movement dedicated to bringing that about … a movement comprising folks from every corner of the political spectrum, narrowly focused on that one objective. This movement would include a number of people you completely disagree with on a range of issues. Some of these people would certainly be racists. Others of them might be anti-semites, or believe that gender is something you’re born with, or that Jesus of Nazareth was the son of God. Could you even consider working with them anyway, in order to force the government (and the corporations that currently control it) to provide affordable healthcare to its citizens like every other developed country?

Now, I want to be as clear as possible about this (but I’m not going to put a period after every word, because I think that’s silly). I’m not talking about blowing Mike Cernovich or working with any idiots wearing swastika tattoos on their foreheads or anything. I’m talking about cooperating with other members of the working class (who you probably wouldn’t want to have a smoothie with) on a single issue that would definitely necessitate confrontation with the corporatist plutocracy, but that would also require you to temporarily overlook certain intersectional issues (like a lot of people have to do at Thanksgiving), that is, assuming the racists would also keep their racism to themselves for a while.

Who knows, maybe taking on the corporate power structure together to achieve one important common goal might lead to things we can’t even imagine, like, well, some weird sort of solidarity that isn’t based solely on race or gender, and that allows some leeway for humans to be the horrible, beautiful, contradictory, screwed-up works-in-progress that we are. If memory serves, there used to be a term for this type of solidarity, “class consciousness,” I think, or something vulgar like that.

Or, I don’t know, maybe I’m out of my mind. I did have a rather stressful week, and I’m taking a number of medications. Maybe this Intersectionality thing, and this calling-folks-fascists-on-Twitter thing, is working. We probably just need to give it more time, and hope the Deep State doesn’t nuke us all to death before we attain whatever state of emotional and ideological perfection the Intersectionalists deem sufficient.

Which reminds me, I should probably go check my timeline before this essay goes to press to make sure I haven’t accidentally liked or retweeted anything inappropriate, or that could possibly be misinterpreted by anyone. Given my current convalescent condition, I doubt I could withstand the verbal thrashing that such transgression would certainly deserve … on the other hand, it should boost my Twitter following, which is what it’s really all about, after all.

CJ Hopkins

(first published in CounterPunch, July 28, 2017)

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our self-appointed political pundit and in-house satirist, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the views or opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its management, staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns.

The Good Americans

The Pink Revolution of 2017, better known as Russiagate, is now more or less a fait accompli. Whether the corporatist ruling classes and their servants in Congress formally impeach him or force him to resign in disgrace, Donald J. Trump is being regime-changed, or at the very least effectively neutralized until he can be replaced with a grown-up, i.e., someone who will serve their interests without getting the masses all riled up about “taking the government back from the elites,” putting “America first,” and, well, just generally making an ass of himself. At this point, not even a war will save him. Even if he could somehow manage to convince the boys in the Pentagon to back an invasion of Iran, or Syria, or wherever, the corporate-owned press would crucify him, and you can’t arbitrarily invade other countries without the support of the corporate media. No, the simple fact is, the Corporatocracy has decided to make an example of Trump, to remind folks who is really running things, and what happens when you attempt to defy them, and there’s nothing Trump can do about it, other than rant and rave on Twitter.

The United States of America being a profoundly authoritarian society (whose citizens have been conditioned from childhood to follow orders, go through channels, submit to a host of humiliating rituals devised by an ever-expanding range of government and private “security services,” and to worship leaders, police, soldiers, and, basically, anyone wearing a uniform, or a Giorgio Armani business suit), this ruling class soft coup is cause for celebration. Good Americans up and down both coasts are already dusting off their vuvuzelas. It isn’t quite time to use them yet, but they want to be ready for the moment Trump waddles across the lawn of the White House, boards Marine One for the final time, and is flown away to exile in Florida, or to Leavenworth to be hanged for treason. At which point they, these Good Americans, will pour en masse onto Lafayette Square, hooting, hollering, and waving flags, as they did when Obama sent Seal Team Six to roust the former CIA asset, Osama bin Laden, out of bed, shoot him several times in the face, and then dump his body in the Indian Ocean, or whatever it was that actually happened.

Good Americans, as a general rule, are not overly concerned with what actually happened. Or what is actually happening now. Or at least they’re not too concerned with the details. History, politics, economics, not to mention the inner workings of the media, are complicated subjects best left to experts. Good Americans trust such experts (not implicitly, they’re not dupes, after all) to explain what happened, or what is happening, to them. They have no choice but to trust these experts, and government officials, and the mainstream media, and the general consensus among the members of their privileged socioeconomic circles, as they do not have the time or the energy to go digging through reams of declassified documents, or to check the facts of the stories that appear in The New York Times or The Washington Post, or on their National Public Radio affiliate, or to read a book about history or politics, or the dissemination of propaganda, written by someone who isn’t parroting the official narrative of the ruling classes. What with all the demands of work, family, Facebook, Twitter, yoga, shopping, keeping up-to-date with the latest dining trends, not to mention the new season of House of Cards, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to scrutinize everything their leaders are doing, or the “information” the media is feeding them.

This does not make these Good Americans accomplices to any alleged atrocities perpetrated by their elected government. The United States isn’t Nazi Germany. OK, sure, we wiped out the Native Americans (and sadistically named some of our sports teams after them), but that was hundreds of years ago. The same goes for slavery … ancient history. And, alright, so the United States, and the indigenous death squads we have trained and funded, have murdered millions of men, women, and children in places like Indochina, Indonesia, Central America, South America, and the Middle East, and we’ve bombed and invaded a long list of countries that posed no threat to us whatsoever purely to advance the interests of the corporations that own the government, and their ongoing quest for global hegemony … still, it’s not like Nazi Germany, where people went blithely on with their lives, pretending they had no idea what was happening.

No, these Good Americans, who at the moment are shrieking for Donald Trump’s head on a pike because the CIA and the corporate-owned media told them he’s a Russian operative, or that the Russians somehow “hacked” the election, are not at all like the Germans back then. Parroting the mindless propaganda pumped out by a global network of corporate media that Joseph Goebbels would have given Hitler’s other nut to control, and otherwise collaborating with the intelligence agencies, financial elites, and other deep state players intent on making an example of Trump, is … OK, admittedly, pretty pathetic, but it’s not like looking the other way while your government methodically kills the Jews. On top of which, Trump really is a bad guy, and Good Americans traditionally support, or at least don’t raise a major fuss about, the summary removal of government leaders the mainstream media tells them are bad guys.

Coincidentally, a lot of these bad guys, in addition to being hideously evil, have been, circa the time of their removal, interfering with the vital interests of the corporations that own our government. Bashar al-Assad, Muammar Gaddafi, and Saddam Hussein are the most recent examples, but we’ve been doing this since the late 1940s. A partial list of CIA ops, including assassinations, torture, election rigging, coups, and so on, stretching back to the post-WWII period, when we re-installed fascists in Greece and Italy and smuggled Nazis like Reinhard Gehlen, Klaus Barbie (a/k/a “the Butcher of Lyon”), and Eichmann’s good buddy, Otto von Bolschwing to America to help us defeat “the Communists,” is available for perusal online, and in any number of books and articles. It’s not like this stuff is secret or anything.

But whatever … no government is perfect, right? And Good Americans are grown-ups, after all. So they understand that all that crap about democracy is important to teach the children, and to put on the masthead of your newspaper, or whatever, but the real world doesn’t work like that. In the real world, where the Good Americans live, safely insulated from the abject poverty they are not in any way responsible for, sometimes you have to hire a few Nazis, or support a couple of fascist regimes, or sell a few buttloads of arms to the Saudis, despite the fact that they’re a brutal theocracy and the primary sponsors of the Terrorism we claim to be bombing the Middle East to stop, or bankrupt a few hundred thousand Americans to bail out your pals at the Wall Street banks that bled them dry with their Ponzi scheme, or support an Apartheid state like Israel, or sell Americans some convoluted corporate-friendly healthcare plan as if it were somehow completely impossible to provide a universal healthcare system like every other developed country, or lead the world in mass incarceration, primarily of the lower classes, who are already mass incarcerated in ghettos patrolled by militarized police, which of course bears no resemblance at all to the ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe, and is regrettably just a permanent feature of the grown-up reality the Good Americans are utterly powerless to ever change.

Alright, I know you’re probably thinking that sounds a lot like the rationalizations the Good Germans used to excuse themselves for not resisting the horrors of the Nazis, but it isn’t the same kind of thing at all. The Good Americans are resisting … they’re resisting Trump, who, after all, is the one responsible for all that stuff, all those wars of aggression, the CIA coups, the torture, the death squads, the ghettos, et cetera … our entire seventy-two-year history as Enforcer of global Capitalist empire and all the incalculable human suffering and irreparable damage to the planet it has caused … all that is somehow the doing of Trump and his puppet-master, Vladimir Putin. Or at least it’s not Obama’s fault, or the fault of any of his Democrat predecessors, those champions of the poor and downtrodden who never need to be resisted.

So please join the Good Americans this weekend as they do their part to help the corporatist establishment make an example of this monster (whose evil outstrips that of Hitler, and Pol Pot, and Stalin, and, well, pick your monster) and discourage any future billionaire ass hats from screwing with their simulation of democracy. They’ll be staging huge rallies all around the country to whip up support for the Pink Revolution, and possibly even all-out Blitzkrieg against our bestial Slavic enemies before they “influence” another election, or hack another rural power grid. They’re calling it the “March for Truth.” It’s a totally grassroots volunteer effort that has absolutely nothing to do with David Brock, Peter Daou, or Shareblue, or the Democratic Party, or any of its neoliberal backers. This one probably won’t quite match the Nuremberg rallies for flat-out hysteria, but give the ruling classes some time … “Resistance Summer” is just getting started.

CJ Hopkins

(first published in CounterPunch, June 1, 2017)

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our self-appointed political pundit and in-house satirist, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the views or opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its management, staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns.

Invasion of the Putin-Nazis

So, here we are, a little over one hundred days into “The Age of Darkness” and the “racially Orwellian” Trumpian Reich, and, all right, while it’s certainly no party, it appears that those reports we heard of the Death of Neoliberalism were greatly exaggerated. Not only has the entire edifice of Western democracy not been toppled, but the global capitalist ruling classes seem to be going about their business in more or less the usual manner. The Goldman Sachs vampires are back in the White House (as they have been for over one hundred years). The post-Cold War destabilization and restructuring of the Middle East is moving forward right on schedule. The Russians, Iranians, North Koreans, and other non-globalist-ball-playing parties remain surrounded by the most ruthlessly murderous military machine in the annals of history. Greece is being debt-enslaved and looted. And so on. Life is back to normal.

Or, OK, not completely normal. Because, despite the fact that editorialists at “respectable” papers like The New York Times (and I’m explicitly referring to Charles M. Blow and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman) have recently dropped the completely ridiculous “Trump is a Putinist agent” propaganda they’d been relentlessly spewing since he won the election, a significant number of deluded persons, having swallowed their official vomitus (i.e., the vomitus of Blow and Krugman, and other neoliberal establishment hacks) like the hungry Adélie penguin chicks in those nature shows narrated by David Attenborough, are convinced (these deluded persons are) that the Russians are waging a global campaign not only to maliciously hack, or interfere with, or marginally influence, free and fair elections throughout the Western world, but to control the minds of Westerners themselves, in some Orwellian, or possibly Wachowskian fashion. Worse yet, these deluded persons are certain, the Russians are now secretly running the White House, and are just using Trump, and the Goldman Sachs gang, and capitalist centurions like General McMaster, as a front for their subversive activities … like denying Americans universal healthcare and privatizing the hell out of everything.

If you think I’m being hyperbolic, check out #MarchforTruth on Twitter, or its anonymous Crowdpac fundraising page, which at first glance I took for an elaborate prank, but which seems to be in deadly earnest about “restoring faith in American government,” uncovering Trump’s “collusion” with Russia, and reversing his “subversion of the will of the people.” The plan is, on June 3, 2017, thousands of otherwise rational Americans are going to pour into the streets “demanding answers” from, well, I’m not sure whom, some independent prosecutor, or congressional committee, or intelligence agency, or whomever is responsible for ferreting out the Putin-Nazi infiltrators that “respected” pundits like Blow and Krugman (and stark raving loonies like Louise Mensch) have convinced them are now controlling the government. Weirdly, these same “respected” journalists, the ones who have been assuring the world that The President of the United States is a covert agent working for Russia, have failed to even mention this March for Truth, and are acting like they had nothing to do with whipping these folks up into a frenzy of apoplectic paranoia.

Incidentally, one of my colleagues contacted Mr. Blow directly and inquired as to whether he’d be vociferously supporting or possibly leading the March for Truth, and was chastised by Blow and his Twitter followers. I found this reaction extremely troubling, and asked my colleague to contact Mensch and suggest she check with her handlers at The Times to make sure the Russians haven’t gotten to him. However, just as he was sitting down to do that, the “Comey-firing” brouhaha broke, which seems to have brought Blow back to the fold, albeit in a less hysterical manner than his Rooskie-hunting readers have grown accustomed to. We can only hope that both he and Krugman return to form in the weeks to come as Russiagate builds to its dramatic climax.

Oh, yeah, and if Russiagate isn’t paranoid enough, apparently, the corporate media is now prepared to deploy the “Putin-Nazi Election Hackers” propaganda in any and every election going forward (as they did in the recent French election, and as they tried to do in the Dutch elections, and presumably will in the German elections, and as The Guardian appears to be retroactively doing in regard to the Brexit referendum). Any day now, we should be hearing of the “Putin-Nazi-Corbyn Axis,” and the “Putin-Nazi-Podemos Pact,” and video footage of Martin Schultz and a bevy of former-East German hookers engaging in Odinist sex magick rituals in an FSB-owned bordello in Moscow. Soon, it won’t just be elections … we’ll be hearing reports of Russian shipments of rocks, bottles, and pointy sticks to the “Putin-Nazi Palestinian Terrorists,” and … well, who knows how far they’re willing to take this?

All joking aside, as I’ve written about previously, what we’re dealing with here is more than just a lame attempt by the Democratic Party to blame its humiliating loss on Putin (although of course it certainly is that in part). The global neoliberal establishment is rolling out a new official narrative. It’s actually just a slight variation on the one it’s been selling us since 2001. I could come up with a sixteen-syllable, academic-sounding name for this narrative, but I’m trying to keep things simple these days … so let’s call it The Normals versus The Extremists, (the Normals being the neoliberals and the Extremists being everyone else). The goal of this narrative is to stigmatize and otherwise marginalize opposition to Neoliberalism, regardless of the nature of that opposition (i.e., whether it comes from the left, right, or from religious, environmentalist, or any other quarters).

Now, as any professional storyteller will tell you, one of the most important aspects of the narrative you’re trying to suck people into is to make your protagonist a likeable underdog, and then pit him or her against a much more powerful and ideally incorrigibly evil enemy. During the Cold War, this was easy to do — the story was Democracy versus the Commies, traditional “good versus evil”-type stuff. Once the U.S.S.R. collapsed, the concept needed major rewrites, as a new evil adversary had to be found. This (i.e., the 1990s) was a rather awkward and frustrating period. The global capitalist ruling classes, giddy with joy after having become the first ever global ideological hegemon in the history of aspiring global hegemons, got all avant-garde for a while, and thought they could do without an “enemy.” This approach, as you’ll recall, did not sell well. No one quite got why we were bombing Yugoslavia, and Bush and Baker had to break out the Hitler schtick to gin up support for rescuing the Kuwaitis from their old friend Saddam. Fortunately, in September 2001, the show runners got the break they were looking for, and the official narrative was instantly switched to Democracy versus The Islamic Terrorists. This re-brand got extremely good ratings, and would have been extended indefinitely if not for what began to unfold in the latter half of 2016. (One could go back and locate the week when the mainstream media officially switched from the “Summer of Terror” narrative they were flogging to the new “Invasion of the Putin-Nazis” narrative … my guess is, it was early to mid-September.) It started with the Brexit referendum, continued with the rise of Trump, and … well, I don’t have to recount it all, do I? You remember last year as clearly as I do, how, suddenly, out of seemingly nowhere, the Putin-Nazi menace materialized, and took the place of the “self-radicalized terrorist” as the primary target for people’s hatred and fear. OK, sure, at first, there were no Putin-Nazis. It was just that the Brexit folks were fascists, and Trump was Hitler, and Bernie Sanders was some sort of racist hacky sack Communist. But then the Putinists poisoned Clinton, and unleashed their legions of Russian propagandists on the gullible, Oxycodone-addicted denizens of “flyover country,” and, as they say, the rest is history.

In any event, here we are now … stuck inside this simulation of “reality” where Putin-Nazi hackers are coming out of the woodwork, a partyless neoliberal banker has been elected the President of France, Donald Trump is an evil mastermind or a Russian operative, depending on what day it is (as opposed to just a completely incompetent, narcissistic billionaire idiot), and neoliberal propaganda outfits like The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, The Guardian, NPR, et al., are perceived as “respectable” sources of journalism, as if their role in generating and occasionally revising the official narrative weren’t so insultingly obvious. Personally, I am looking forward to the upcoming German elections this Autumn, wherein Neoliberal Party “A” is challenging Neoliberal Party “B” for the right to continue privatizing Greece (and any other formerly sovereign nations the banks can get their hands on) in a demonstration of European unity, and fiscal austerity … and, you know, whatever.

If this is the Death of Neoliberalism, just imagine what awaits us at the Resurrection.

CJ Hopkins

(first published in CounterPunch, May 16, 2017)

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our self-appointed political pundit and in-house satirist, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the views or opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its management, staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns.

The President Formerly Known as Hitler

So the President formerly known as Hitler has apparently pulled his head out of his ass and gotten with the global capitalist program. The ruling classes couldn’t be more relieved, as it was beginning to look like they were going to have to carry on with their totally ridiculous “Manchurian President” propaganda indefinitely, or deal with Trump in some harsher way, which, given the paranoid mood in the country and the heavily-armed nature of a lot of his supporters, was going to get a little tricky.

Luckily, however, H. R. McMaster, James Mattis, and the rest of the permanent members of the global capitalist war machine (better known as the United States military), as well as his bleeding heart daughter, Ivanka, were able to talk some sense into Trump, and convince him to employ about sixty cruise missiles to pointlessly obliterate a Syrian airstrip, and then drop a $314 million Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb on a few dozen “terrorists” in some caves in Afghanistan. The fact that these air strikes had virtually zero military value was beside the point. The global capitalist ruling classes needed Trump to demonstrate that he is ready and willing to continue the wholesale restructuring of the Middle East that they’ve been carrying out since the end of the Cold War, and bomb whatever they tell him to bomb, and, basically, do what the fuck he’s told when it comes to geopolitical matters. Trump, who was probably tired of losing, and being referred to as Bannon’s puppet, and being accused of treason, and so on, and who never really gave two shits about the suckers he conned into voting for him anyway, had one of those Road to Damascus experiences and gave the Pentagon boys carte blanche.

The display of overwhelming force that followed, at 08:40 EST, April 6, 2017, signaled the start of the Trumpian reign. CNN talking head Fareed Zakaria put it this way the following evening, “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States last night … for the first time really as president, he talked about international norms, international rules, about America’s role in enforcing justice in the world.”

This was approximately 24 hours after CNN and the other totally objective members of the mainstream media had had a chance to calm down a little, and to clean up after the orgy of obsequious cheerleading they had indulged in the previous evening. For most of the spastic talking heads who are paid to repeat whatever some producer whispers into their earpieces around the clock while making weird faces, the footage of those turgid Tomahawk missiles rising angrily out of their silos on their way to violently penetrate the enemy and explode in shuddering spasms of global corporatist power was literally orgasmic. Pent-up editorialists instantly pumped out geysers of overwhelming approval. MSNBC’s Brian Williams lost it and started raving on camera about “the beauty of our fearsome armaments,” and quoting Leonard Cohen, and so on. The Washington Post immediately brought in Robert Kagan to froth at the mouth about “rebalancing Syria in America’s favor.” And it wasn’t just the US press and the corporate-owned US political establishment. The rest of the global capitalist empire (Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the European Council, Spain, Italy, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, et al.) were quick to cheer Trump’s transformation into a grown-up, moderate, more or less rational, or at least obedient, globalist puppet.

Now, I owe Trump an apology at this point, because his sudden conversion to the Globalist faith proves that he is not the total ass hat I’ve accused him of being for twenty five years, or at least that he is not suicidal. Prior to his soul-searching talk with Ivanka, and his chat with the generals, and to viewing the photos of those “beautiful babies” gassed by Assad in a last-ditch attempt to force the USA to invade his country and hang him to death, he (i.e., Trump, not Assad) was on the verge of a massive heart attack, or a stroke, or other medical event, or just accidentally getting shot in the head by some mentally unstable, three-named gunman. Or maybe The New York Times‘ guest loony, the increasingly Strangelovian Louise Mensch, was going to uncover a grainy VHS tape of Trump and Putin in their BDSM-wear signing a pact to destroy America in the urine of a Muscovite prostitute … or whatever.

The point is, Trump was playing with fire, having misunderstood his job description. For a while there it seemed he actually believed he was going to defy the will of all those “global elites” he’d been railing against (and, no, I’m not referring to “the Jews,” I’m referring to the global capitalist establishment and the armies they employ to keep them in power). This, of course, was never going to happen. The global capitalist ruling classes can put up with a lot from a US president (who is the most powerful man in the world, after all), but there are a few lines one does not cross, and some fundamental responsibilities they need to know are going to get handled. Playing neo-nationalist grab-ass (or selling the world some Hope and Change crap) is all fine and good when you are out on the hustings, but as Obama noted on his way out of town, “reality has a way of asserting itself.” Or, as corporatist puppet Chuck Schumer put it,”you take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you.” I don’t mean to be overly dramatic, but we’re talking about the US military, CIA, NSA, and the rest of the military industrial complex. These are people who have no problem murdering entire families by day and going home and playing with their kids at night. Did anyone really think they were going to allow some word-salad-babbling billionaire to screw around with their long-term objectives because he happened to win a presidential election?

In any event, the danger has passed. Trump, having assumed the mantle of Commander in Chief of Global Capitalism’s worldwide arbitrary killing machine (and with Cohn and the usual Goldman Sachs guys making sure he doesn’t go nuts and start screwing around with their ongoing efforts to transform the planet into one big happy, neo-feudalist theme park prison), can relax and focus on improving his golf swing. Whatever mess he makes of the country (i.e., the United States of America, the nominally sovereign nation state that most Americans believe they live in) will be tolerated by the global capitalist establishment, as they couldn’t care less about actual Americans, or Brits, or Greeks, or Syrians, or whoever. We’re all just a bunch of canon fodder, and servants, and deplorables, and losers, to them.

If it’s any consolation, at least we’ll be able to get back to “normality,” finally. Yes, it will likely take a few weeks for liberals to fully recover from the shock of the cancellation of Holocaust Redux and the Imminent Invasion of the Putin-Nazis, but my prediction is, by sometime this Summer, we’ll have returned to more or less business as usual. That is, of course, unless Putin the Evil hacks the upcoming French elections … in which case, you know, End of Democracy, and Holocaust II, et cetera, again. Stay tuned to the corporate media for moment-by-moment updates on that.

CJ Hopkins

(first published in CounterPunch, April 21, 2017)

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our self-appointed political pundit and in-house satirist, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the views or opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its management, staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns.