Category Archives: Culture war

A Draconian New Law Went Into Effect on August 25th That Institutes Extreme Censorship of the Internet on a Global Basis

Article by Michael Snyder.

Excerpts:

The Internet just changed forever, but most people living in the United States don’t even realize what just happened.  A draconian new law known as the “Digital Services Act” went into effect in the European Union on Friday, and it establishes an extremely strict regime of Internet censorship that is far more authoritarian than anything we have ever seen before.  From this point forward, hordes of European bureaucrats will be the arbiters of what is acceptable to say on the Internet.  If they discover something that you have said on a large online platform that they do not like, they can force that platform to take it down, because someone in Europe might see it.  So even though this is a European law, the truth is that it is going to have a tremendous impact on all of us.

Initially, there will be 19 giant online platforms that will be forced to comply with this new law…

But starting on February 24th, 2024, the Digital Services Act will start applying to a much broader spectrum of online platforms that have fewer than 45 million monthly users.

You might be tempted to think that you will be able to avoid all of this censorship because you do not live in Europe. Unfortunately, that is simply not true. If you post something that someone in Europe might see, your content comes under the jurisdiction of this horrifying new law. So you need to brace yourself for a level of Internet censorship that none of us have ever seen before.

From this point forward, it is going to become much more difficult to share alternative views on the Internet.

For a long time, the Internet allowed ordinary people like you and ordinary people like me to share truth with a world that was desperate for it.

But now the gatekeepers are exerting a draconian level of control, and the Internet will never, ever be the same again.

Something is happening in Argentina

They may be about to elect the world's first AnCap president

Says Doug Casey in this interview.

Excerpt:

Milei is totally sound from an economic, political, and a philosophical point of view. But—and this is critically important—he’s sound from a moral point of view.

He deals in basic concepts of good and evil, right and wrong. That’s something that no politician anywhere discusses, certainly not in South America. It’s the equivalent of hitting a donkey between the eyes with a two-by-four to get his attention. Everyone intuitively understands that the political class is essentially criminal—but only Milei is brave enough to say it. The average guy wants to do the right thing, the moral thing. That’s what Milei is pointing out to people and why they like him. He doesn’t use doubletalk, brook compromise, or support half measures.

The “Free-Speech Twitter” PSYOP

Article by CJ Hopkins.

Excerpts:

What’s happening is, GloboCap, or Corporatism, or whatever you want to call the network of global corporations, governments, media, non-governmental governing entities, investment banks, global health authorities, academia, the culture industry, and other such entities that together comprise the decentralized system of power and ideology that is currently running the entire planet … whatever you want to call that, it’s going totalitarian.

For now, trust me, we are going totalitarian. That’s what all the “visibility filtering” is about. That’s what the “cancel culture” is about. That’s what all the mindless mass hysteria and the demonization and criminalization of dissent is about.

It’s what the “Free-Speech Twitter” PSYOP is about. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether Elon Musk even knows what he is doing. The system that he is an integral part of is evolving. Musk will help it evolve or he will be replaced by someone who will help it evolve. Musk, Yaccarino, Zuckerberg, Pichai, Gates, Klaus Schwab, Wang Zhonglin, or pick your evil mastermind! These people, notwithstanding their very real power, are just components of a system, a global system, a system that is evolving toward totalitarianism, because it doesn’t really have anything else to do.

I do not know how to stop this from happening, this evolution of global capitalism into a new form of totalitarianism, but one thing that occurs to me is, it might help matters if we slowed down a bit and tried to actually understand what is happening, like in the broader, historical, systemic sense, and maybe didn’t chomp down on every little piece of red-meat bait that gets dangled in our faces, and then whipped up into a frenzy over whatever the visibility-filtering team at Twitter, or X, or Meta, or Alphabet, or some other corporation, wants us whipped up over.

Why is the West so Weak (and Russia so Strong)?

The role of human capital and western education

Article by Gaius Baltar.

I suggest that the cause of this unfolding disaster is a serious structural problem in the West – which Russia seems to have largely avoided. This structural problem is a necessary condition for the current western system and has been purposely created to bring it about and maintain it. This problem is the subject of this article – as well as the “mechanism” behind it. This is unfortunately a long article, but the subject matter demands it.

Never Forget: Leftists Showed Their True Authoritarian Colors During Covid

Article by Brandon Smith

Excerpts:

And why did so many Americans (mainly leftists) jump on the authoritarian bandwagon when it comes to lockdowns and forced vaccination?

I want to explore the psychology of such people here, because I think it’s the natural inclination of the public today to move on quickly from the discomfort of terrible events and ignore the deeper implications. We cannot move on from this, because the ultimate problem was never solved. These same leftists and globalists were never admonished for their behavior, they never had to admit they were wrong and they WILL attempt the same draconian measures again in the future if left unchecked.

[. . .]

The political left uses the mentally ill as a bludgeon, an easily manipulated tool for chaos. During the lockdowns and restrictions the establishment and the media stoked the fires of paranoia.  By themselves they have no power; they need the crazed mob as a weapon to keep the rest of the country afraid and in line. They needed good little Stasi, always watching, always correcting, always screaming at those without masks, attacking those that refused to get vaxxed and mocking those that spoke out about scientific inconsistencies.

And, in return, the establishment made the mentally ill feel as if they were normal. For a fleeting moment in time, the most unstable and narcissistic people on the planet were made to feel like THEY were on the right side of history and rationality. It was a parasitic feedback loop that almost destroyed the last vestiges of America.

[. . .]

All of this could very well happen again. The big tyrants and tiny tyrants are still out there, waiting for the next crisis; the next panic event to take the public off their guard. Another viral event is unlikely, but they do seem anxious to use climate change, war and economic turmoil as the next great “reset” button. In the end, there will have to be a dramatic shift in how the liberty minded interact with the authoritarian left. It is clear that we cannot share the same country, or the same civilization. Our values are fundamentally at odds. It’s only a matter of time before a single spark ignites a firestorm.

The Problem With “The Media”

Mainstream Journalists Are Cloistered Ivy League-Educated Trust Fund Kids

Writes Caitlin Johnstone:

Iraq war cheerleader David Brooks has an article in The New York Times titled “What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?“, another one of those tired old think pieces we’ve been seeing for the last eight years that asks “golly gosh could we coastal elites have played some role in the rise of Trumpism?” like it’s the first time anyone has ever considered that obvious point (the answer is yes, duh, you soft-handed silver spoon-fed ivory tower bubble boy).

One worthwhile paragraph about the media stands out though:

“Over the last decades we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession, we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.”

Brooks is not the first to make this observation about the drastic shift in the socioeconomic makeup of news reporters that has taken place from previous generations to now.

“The class factor in journalism gets overlooked,” journalist Glenn Greenwald said on the Jimmy Dore Show in 2021. “Thirty or forty years ago, fifty years ago, journalists really were outsiders. That’s why they all had unions; they made shit money, they came from like working class families. They hated the elite. They hated bankers and politicians. It was kind of like a boss-employee relationship — they hated them and wanted to throw rocks at them and take them down pegs.”

“If I were to list the twenty richest people I’ve ever met in my entire life, I think like seven or eight of them are people I met because they work at The Intercept — people from like the richest fucking families on the planet,” Greenwald added.

Journalist Matt Taibbi, whose father worked for NBC, made similar observations on the Dark Horse podcast back in 2020.

“Reporters when I was growing up, they came from a different class of people than they do today,” Taibbi said. “A lot of them were kind of more working class — their parents were more likely to be plumbers or electricians than they were to be doctors or lawyers. Like this thing where the journalist is an Ivy League grad, that’s a relatively new thing that I think came about in the seventies and eighties with my generation. But reporters just instinctively hated rich people, they hated powerful people. Like if you put up a poster of a politician in a newsroom it was defaced instantaneously, like there were darts on it. Reporters saw it as their job to stick it to the man.”

“Mostly the job is different now,” Taibbi said. “The fantasy among reporters in the nineties about politicians started to be, I want to be the person that hangs out with the candidate after the speech and has a beer and is sort of close to power. And that’s kind of the model, that’s where we’re at right now. That’s kind of the problem is that basically people in the business want to be behind the rope line with people of influence. And it’s going to be a problem to get us back to that other adversarial posture of the past.”

This is a major reason behind the freakish sycophancy and empire loyalism we see in the mainstream press. It’s not just the obscenely wealthy owners of the mass media who are protecting their class interests — it’s the reporters, editors and pundits as well.

These are typically fairly wealthy people from fairly wealthy families, who become more and more wealthy the more their careers are elevated. As insiders of the mainstream press have attested, it’s widely understood by employees of the mainstream media that the way to elevate your career is to toe the establishment line and refrain from spotlighting issues that are inconvenient to the powerful.

This identification with the ruling class feeds into the dynamic described by Taibbi in which modern journalists have come to value close proximity to those in power. These are the people they want to be sharing drinks with and going to parties with and invited to the weddings of; the “us vs them” dynamic which used to exist between the press and politicians switched, and now the press see themselves and the politicians they fraternize with as “us” and the general public as “them”.

There are other factors at play with regard to elite education. The number of journalists with college degrees skyrocketed from 58 percent in 1971 to 92 percent in 2013; if your wealthy parents aren’t paying that off for you then you’ve got crushing student debt that you need to pay off yourself, which you can only do in the field you studied in by making a decent amount of money, which you can only do by acting as a dependable propagandist for the imperial establishment.

Universities themselves tend to play a status quo-serving, conformity-manufacturing role when churning out journalists, as wealth won’t flow into an academic environment that is offensive to the wealthy. Moneyed interests are unlikely to make large donations to universities which teach their students that moneyed interests are a plague upon the nation, and they are certainly not going to send their kids there.

“The whole intellectual culture has a filtering system, starting as a child in school,” Noam Chomsky once explained in an interview. “You’re expected to accept certain beliefs, styles, behavioral patterns and so on. If you don’t accept them, you are called maybe a behavioral problem, or something, and you’re weeded out. Something like that goes on all the way through universities and graduate schools. There is an implicit system of filtering… which creates a strong tendency to impose conformism.”

The people who make it through this filtering system are the ones who are elevated to the most influential positions in our civilization. All the most widely amplified voices in our society are the celebrities, journalists, pundits and politicians who’ve proven themselves to be reliable stewards of the matrix of narrative control which keeps the public jacked in to the mainstream worldview.

Is it any wonder, then, that all the sources we’ve been taught to look to for information about our world continually feed us stories which give the impression that the status quo is working fine and this is the only way things can possibly be? Is it any wonder that the mass media support all US wars and cheerlead all imperial agendas?

This is how things were set up to be. Our media act like propagandists for a tyrannical regime because that’s exactly what they are.