Part 2 of 2 (read Part 1 here)
Activists pretending to be moderators
When Al Gore invented the Internet, this initiated some exciting new changes in technology and society. Promising new startups sprouted like flowers on a hillside. Then, quite often, one of the big players would gobble up the company, chew it up, and eventually spit it out.
Webring, Deja News, and Geocities are gone but not forgotten!
One facet of this tech bonanza is that the public was able to communicate with each other and share information in ways that hadn’t been possible before.
Back in the old days, information mostly went through a limited number of chokepoints: about fifty corporations for broadcast and print media prior to deregulation, this eventually compressed into six monopolies as described above, three commercial TV networks, and two wire services.
Then the Internet provided a new way for information to get around the dam. Perhaps even more significantly, at last this enabled the public to talk back.
For the Powers That Be, of course, this presented a new problem: We can’t just have everyone speaking their minds, now can we? Censorship looks bad, especially in a soi-disant liberal democracy, but big business came to the rescue.
Americans in particular have a naïve faith in capitalism, which often leads to the refrain: “Why, it’s only corporations engaging in censorship, and they can do whatever they want!” (That really doesn’t fly where monopolies are concerned, but that’s another discussion for another day.)
This also comes across as the characteristically libertarian idea that something repressive is bad only if the state is doing the repressing, and that private enterprise can do no wrong. This goes back to the outdated idea that government and business are in eternal opposition; really, at the upper echelons, things are pretty chummy between each other.
As for social media, the same processes of consolidation were at work, in some cases with giant companies chewing up smaller companies and spitting them out. Monopolization became a factor with certain large online businesses as well.
For the most part, we effectively have one search engine, one social media site, one microblogging platform, one video host, one globo-auction, one globo-retailer, one online encyclopedia, one ring to find them all and in the darkness bind them.
As for social media, monopolization re-created the chokepoint situation, much like what already existed in print and broadcast media.
Curiously, the monopolization of cyberspace isn’t always a matter of cutthroat commercial competition, as one might imagine. In some instances, a platform that was heavily promoted and got huge will sort of become the default go-to place, largely because of herd mentality.
It’s “where everyone’s at.” Competition exists, but is unlikely to get popular. Even established platforms are vulnerable to being upstaged by monopolies. Myspace and Livejournal were once thriving online communities, but after Fakebook came along, things just never were the same.
Either way, the disingenuous excuses for corporate censorship continue. Defenders of the Tech Tyrants might say, for example, “If you get banned from YouTube because they don’t like your politics, just build another YouTube.”
Oh, sure, and I bet my fairy godmother will hand me a few billion smackeroos to launch my startup, right? Free speech platforms do exist, but it’s mostly the digital ghetto. (For that matter, there are few payment processors and online advertisers that will say no to the censors.)
Most social media alternatives are fairly obscure and receive much less traffic than their monopolized equivalents. Sometimes free speech platforms receive cyber-attacks, attempts to remove their domain registration, and so forth.
Therefore, the “Just build a competitor” answer from censorship apologists is insufficient, if not disingenuous, since leftists are well-known for using dirty tactics even to get small sites and blogs taken offline for thoughtcrime.
Other than that, sometimes people are targeted for censorship in a clearly coordinated manner, although this is an illegal boycott according to the Sherman Antitrust Act. If someone is effectively banned from the Internet, what’s the solution – build another Internet?
On the micro level, in the trenches where censorship takes place, things don’t look so good. I wrote earlier about Fakebook’s exploited techno-proles contracted to handle “safety and security” while getting paid peanuts. Although they appear to be content moderators, a major part of their duty consists of deleting naughty political posts.
This is no easy task, since they’re expected to know Fakebook’s extensive Party Line in intimate detail, even though the specifics are subject to change from one hour to the next. Their job satisfaction was so scintillating that one of the ways to pass the time at work was joking about suicide. I’d feel bad for these sorry chumps if they weren’t social media censors.
The overpaid Left Coasters at Google aimed lower yet – no peanuts required! – attempting to raise a horde of volunteer censors with their “YouTube Heroes” program. (The image this conjures up is of some keyboard warrior composed of lumpy leftist biomass, with enough piercings to qualify as a pincushion, belonging to some gender not found in nature, whose religion is political correctness. It seems quite strange to think of this creature as a “hero” – that’s more like a zero.)
Unfortunately for Google, the proposal was about as popular as the Jeffrey Epstein Refuge For Wayward Girls. So I’ve heard, “Within 72 hours, the video gathered upwards of 1.2 million views, 411,000 dislikes and just 7,100 likes. Comments on the video were disabled by YouTube.”
Ouch! It seems that rattlesnakes are more popular.
A large part of how these corporations get away with it is through carefully-worded terms of service. Most users don’t bother to read any of these extensive texts. They’re so lengthy and difficult that only a contract lawyer is likely to understand the full implications.
For example, can you read through one of these dense documents and figure out how the data mining policies really work? Usually the user agreements will contain the following features buried in the fine print:
- The corporation can change the agreement unilaterally at any time – effectively a “we can do anything” clause. Would you buy a used car from a finance company that grants itself permission to rewrite the contract whenever and however they want?
- The user effectively has no recourse under the law. For one example I noted, you can sue, but the damages are limited to one dollar. Therefore, not only would it be effectively a Bambi v. Godzillalawsuit – you versus a multibillion dollar corporation – the best outcome you could expect to get is the Pyrrhic victory of one buck and a massive lawyer bill.
- The corporation has the ultimate authority to censor anything they wish. The entire user agreement might be ten to twenty thousand words of legalese, but the clause prohibiting politically incorrect postings might simply call it “offensive content” or “hate speech” with little further explanation – or even none. For them, this vagueness is a feature, not a bug. I’ll further add that “hate speech” is a sneaky anticoncept devoid of objective meaning and is therefore unsuitable for a legal document, but that’s another discussion for another time.
It’s hard to think of more lopsided terms than that, short of a 17th century indentured servitude contract. Note that despite deliberately imprecise and minimalistic terminology enabling them to censor whatever they want, these social media companies do indeed have specific policies.
However, actually spelling out how the rules work would bind them to objective standards. In the case of Fakebook, the full details are in their “Known Questions” document, which in 2021 weighed in at 15,000 words. Will they send you a copy of it, so you can be extra sure you’re following the rules? I wouldn’t bet on it.
Activists pretending to be preachers
Long ago, a boomer from Dixie told me how things went on the ecclesiastical front during earlier times, as he’d seen it unfold. At first, the ministers had been preaching that the Bible endorsed segregation.
Then the World Council of Churches got its hooks into the various denominations. (I’ll add that the National Council of Churches might have been acting as a proxy for them, since they took on a very politicized role from the start. Both organizations in earlier times were suspected of being Communist front groups.)
At some point during the 1950s, new marching orders went down the transmission belt to the converged denominations. Then the ministers reversed course and started preaching that the Bible endorsed integration. Proverbially, one can use Scripture to argue for just about anything. Still, I have to wonder about those Southern ministers – what happened to their balls?
Of course, things slid a lot further downhill in many denominations. This is especially for those that dish out watered-down ultracalvinism, in some cases washed out and politicized to the point that they’re religions in name only.
It’s a long topic, but I’m not one of those who regard Christianity as ideological sabotage from ancient times. Neither do I believe that cucked interpretations of Scripture are particularly authoritative, much less the only possible ones.
Not so long ago, Christianity was a brake on the worse parts of modernity, at least to some degree. Now, all too many denominations were converged and repurposed. Simply put, religion got corrupted to a large degree, no different from all other opinion-forming institutions now delivering full-spectrum ideological indoctrination.
Not all ministers are like that, of course, but the rest have a lot to answer for. The worst part of it is that these phony preachers pretend to speak for God. At first glance, they seem like rotten hypocrites, but it’s entirely possible that some of them are brainwashed enough to confuse their smelly secular ideology for holiness.
I’m not even sure what I really believe, but still I find these sanctimonious preachers particularly galling. They spout moldy leftist platitudes, with their rhetoric dressed up in the guise of righteousness and universal truths. I’ll confess that I haven’t read Dante, but I bet he had a pretty good description of some overheated subterranean pit which will be the eternal destination for those who misrepresent Scripture.
As for black clergy, the common ministers who attend to their congregations and stay out of the public spotlight are usually unobjectionable. For the most part, these are pillars of the community who provide a much-needed good influence.
On the other hand, finding a famous black cleric – one with national name recognition, or aspiring to it – who’s really in it for the theology seems about as rare as finding a black author who writes about anything besides being black.
For some reason, the famous ones are quite often political figures with a plastic halo. Their particular form of politics invariably has to do with racial activism; anything else is a side agenda. Although the piety act is for show, apparently it does fool some white liberal rubes, or they probably wouldn’t bother with the imposture.
The archetypal example, of course, was St. Dr. Rev. MLK Jr. The big brown plastic Jesus has been praised up to the skies, including by lukewarm conservatives who assume he actually believed the universalist sentiments in his oratory. He remains the most recognized figure in the “civil rights” pantheon, but the ugly truth about him takes several pages to describe.
For one thing, he was the personal golem of a Communist from New York. Comrade Stanley David Levison did happen to be a talented writer, which is why MLK lately is best known for delivering notable speeches.
Although his plagiarism habit has come to public attention, a media blackout remains about his far more monumental character defects. These factors are why MLK is known for saying “I have a dream” rather than his hotel room utterances such as “I’m fucking for God” or “I’m not a Negro tonight.”
Desmond Tutu, the former Anglican archbishop of South Africa, is another example. He was best known as an anti-apartheid figure and an ecclesiastical counterpart to the cuddly terrorist Nelson Mandela. The perpetually grinning holy roller bedecked in religious garb helped give phony moral gravitas to this crypto-Marxist “liberation” movement.
For all the hype, you’d think he’d come up with a miraculous cure for herpes. Naturally, for Tutu’s cheerleading role in transforming Africa’s best-run country into a crime-ridden hellhole, he had a list of honorary degrees and other distinctions longer than Al Capone’s arrest record.
These honors, of course, were bestowed by white Gutmenschen eager to glorify anti-white causes. If given a chance, these people would’ve been happy to suck Desmond Tutu’s holy toes as if they were chocolate Easter eggs.
Activists pretending to be scientists
All told, the scientific method is a pretty good way of arriving at the truth. It does work if done correctly, though the process isn’t immune to gaming the system, bad statistics, or the usual sorts of pressures. Sometimes meta-studies produce interesting results.
An old classic was comparing how well mice trained to run mazes performed compared to a control group of untrained mice. (The first group performed better, just as expected, according to the study. Actually, none of the mice had special training, and it was the researchers being tested – surprise!)
For a more recent meta-study, it turns out that most studies turned out not to be repeatable. Worse, another meta-study showed that most studies “proved” the point that the people who paid the researchers wanted them to “prove.”
This isn’t a put-down against the scientific method, or a suggestion that we should return to horoscopes and phlogiston theory and go read tea leaves. Rather, science has to be done right to produce meaningful results.
Other than that, scientists are mere mortals, and this should be kept in mind when someone tries to play “my researcher can beat up your researcher.”
Just keep the bullshit detectors on! When politics gets involved, then things really go awry. This brings us to a notable difference in worldview, in which the right is interested in the truth and the left is interested in results. Therefore:
- Rightists: If the theory doesn’t fit the facts, change the theory.
- Leftists: If the theory doesn’t fit the facts, change the facts.
Serving this purpose are activists pretending to be scientists. There once was a consensus, ever since Darwin, that race is real and meaningful. Then race denialism became a front in the culture war, ongoing for a century. Franz Boas, Trofim Lysenko, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin – I’m looking right at you!
Of these “scientists,” the first three faked their research. Lewontin did not, as far as we know, but he did famously make up a disingenuous argument to push the race denialism narrative.
Other than Lysenko, a garden-variety Russian, they were the kind of Jews who make all other Jews look bad, the same as several other race denial activists pretending to be scientists. (If they want better public relations, they should stop doing that – just saying!)
Moreover, they were pinkos, except for Boas who merely was colored violet blush.
Race has been studied enough that there would still be a clear consensus about it, if not for all the activists pretending to be scientists who do everything they can to fake their research, shout down their opposition, and otherwise muddy up the waters.
One day, historians will look back on leftist hysterics about race denial and make obvious comparisons to how Galileo was treated. The implications are enormous. With honest discussion about racial differences, the biggest and nastiest facet of contemporary leftist ideology would crumble.
Without it, absolute egalitarianism goes unchallenged, and baloney like “white privilege” is the default explanation for differences in socioeconomic outcomes. The next step, of course, involves demands to siphon more resourcesfrom designated “oppressors” – that’s us – to drag us down until everyone is at the same level, because their expectation is equality of results.
There are, of course, other uses for politicized science. The overrated climate change scare, the Plandemic, radical gender theory, you name it – hordes of activists pretending to be scientists can be trotted out to push some narrative as needed.
Why, they’re experts – sure you can trust them! Censorship, bullying, and shouting-down are the go-to tactics for the Ministry of Truth to handle opposition. Although academia should be a haven for open debate, that’s not how things really work.
Many campuses are hotbeds of radicalism, and there are lots of nasty things that can happen even to a dissenting tenured professor. Settling debates through intimidation and information-blockading isn’t really how the scientific method is supposed to work, but, ya know. . .
To say that this isn’t exactly a free exchange of ideas is as obvious as saying that water is wet. For matters of politicized science, the presstitutes will step in to assist by ridiculing or misrepresenting the opposition, or even pretending there is no other side.
For full-spectrum coverage, sometimes social media will censor disapproved viewpoints – even those supported by sources with credentials and academic street cred. (There certainly was much of that during the Fauci Flu.)
The result, of course, is that Joe and Jill Sixpack, who get all their information from the MSM, are left to believe that there’s scientific unanimity about whatever it is they’re told.
Implement social leveling schemes because white privilege, deindustrialize the country because global warming, take that jab of experimental gene therapy because emergency, perform sex change procedures on kids because reasons – why, that’s science, and nobody respectable opposes it!
Activists pretending to be historians
Mary Grabar, The Influence of Howard Zinn’s Fake History | National Leadership Seminar
Each race in our diverse world has its own natural interests and priorities. Instead of that expected condition, how do the usual suspects keep their golems bound in their anti-white alliance and constantly agitated?
Meanwhile, how do you make sure that white leftists will keep flagellating themselves like a distributed virtual BDSM convention? Activists pretending to be historians are tremendously useful toward creating a one-sided perspective.
One prime offender is Howard Zinn, a Communist as well as a disgrace to his noble Hebrew ancestors. (There are other activists pretending to be historians who fit this profile.)
By now, his profoundly biased flagship product A People’s History of the United States has been used as an academic textbook, which by now has poisoned the minds of millions of students, encouraging them to hate their own country.
In whites, it generates guilt complexes. In non-whites, it inflames truculence.
According to them, Western civilization – or white history, if you will – is nothing but war, slavery, and imperialism. What they don’t say is that all other races did these things too.
They also won’t tell you that whites created chivalry, the concept of limited warfare, and the Geneva Conventions. Whites were the first to abolish slavery, but you’ll never hear a word of praise about that from leftist “historians.” (The same goes for any other kind of minoritists.
I’ve even heard some of them ungratefully claim that America’s blacks freed themselves without any help.) They also don’t credit whites for bringing enlightenment to their colonies – such as forcing backward races to stop practicing slavery.
Taken as a whole, imperialism as practiced by whites certainly wasn’t the unmitigated horror that activists pretending to be historians say it was.
Also, technology developed by white people brought remarkable advances to the rest of the world, from running water and electricity all the way up to the computers that non-whites use to bellyache about us.
There still are a few American Indian bitter-enders left, but how many would last a week if they had to endure the especially sparse and violent lifestyle of their Stone Age forebears?
How many perpetually aggrieved blacks would want to return to pre-colonial Africa? (Things aren’t doing too great now that the British and French went home, but all that’s another story.)
Although the unprecedented ease and comfort of modern lifestyle was our doing, leftist “historians” won’t give us a word of credit for it. Instead, they do everything they can to fan the flames of resentment.
Activists pretending to be advertisers
This description of the Ministry of Truth has become quite lengthy, but I fear that I’m only hitting the highlights. Be that as it may, the hall of shame wouldn’t be anywhere near complete without mentioning ad agencies that inject sociopolitical propaganda into commercial propaganda.
It was around back in the old days, but at that point, it was fairly inoffensive “Let’s buy the world a Coke” sort of liberal fluff.
By now, it’s in your face, front and center. This is very reckless, since the last thing an advertiser should do is damage the reputation of its sponsor. Associating a company with divisive political stances will do exactly that. It indeed has been demonstrated that a “woke” reputation is bad for business.
Even so, it’s as if the greatest priority of advertisers lately wasn’t to tout products, but rather to push race mixing. Since this nearly always features a black male with a white female, it’s obvious that this isn’t just some random “inclusiveness” shtick, but rather to further the private agenda of those who make these ads.
Not only is that offensive, it’s straight up demoralization propaganda. For an advertiser, that makes about as much sense as getting a product endorsement from Satan. I’d rather see an advertisement with a picture of Jane Fonda hanging with her Viet Cong buddies, or even a picture of two dudes sucking face.
Even blacks are starting to get offended by the race mixing propaganda, and actually for some of the same reasons we are.
Why are advertisers insulting prospective customers? Their industry resembles a microcosm of the MSM, with which they’re in a symbiotic relationship. That is, advertising is dominated by three monopolies.
They’re all Jewish-run, but surely that’s a cohencidence, right? In any event, it’s too bad that they’re needlessly ruining the reputation of their own people. Just saying here, this kind of atrocious misbehavior gets noticed, so maybe they should stop doing that.
And finally
Even as much as I disagree with the leftists, I’ll give them some credit where it’s due. They got to this sort of prominence because they were “the firstest with the mostest” on these fronts.
For generations, leftists were putting themselves out there, getting personally involved in pursuit of their causes, and carrying on their Long March Through the Institutions. Mainstream conservatives were caught off guard, not realizing how things were taking shape until it was too late.
More to the point, in a culture war, actually showing up to the fight certainly counts for a lot. I bet there’s a lesson in this.
By Beau Albrecht
Published by Counter Currents
Republished by The 21st Century
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of 21cir.com