DESPERATE TIMES
AN UPDATE ON THE CULTURE WAR
We are living in desperate times, and desperate measures are being taken.
I warned you years ago that things were going to get weirder as the establishment collapsed. The establishment dictates reality, so when it gets humiliated it doesn’t mean they’re losers and they need to learn their lesson — it means that reality itself is can no longer be correct. Hollywood isn’t in shambles with the worst box office ever. Google isn’t a despised extension of the NSA spy network. Reddit and social media have not been overtaken by ideological zealots bent on wiping out diversity of thought in favor of establishment talking points. Their candidate, Hillary Clinton, won the election. The Deep State wasn’t rejected by the populace. The European Union wasn’t rejected by the British. Your votes shouldn’t have counted, and the results need to be reversed. The Russians “hacked” everything, whatever that means. You’ve been living in a dream. You are imaginary. They are real.
Escapism was once our trusty pacifier. TV, movies, sports, and music were our friend and our sedative, allowing us to carry on like nothing was happening as we occupied ourselves with gentle propaganda and nonsense. It was our cozy blanket. “Progress” was happening steadily in the background while we were enjoying new toys. We got video games, the Internet, and really nice cell phones. Weren’t those happy days? Video games shifted our attention away from their propaganda ecosystems. The Internet showed us a complex reality that was much different and more alarming from the one they constructed for us. We had found a new escapism, and a new reality; cell phones then took these problems and extended them into every area of society, not just the home. We could safely ignore their magazine racks, TV advertisements, and billboards altogether now. We were content with our own things. Podcasts, YouTube videos, e-books, online shopping, multiplayer gaming, social networks. And just like that, the billions of dollars and countless man-hours they spent on keeping us conditioned was pouring down the drain to no effect. The first reaction was to kill it all by peer pressure and stigma. That failed, as mainstream sources only exposed themselves as being “behind the times”. The second reaction was to sue everything, buy everything, and control everything. That only turned people away from the compromised sources and made it clear that New Media was a victim of the establishment hegemony.
The third option was to infiltrate and hijack. This is called “co-opting”. It was going very smoothly for a while, until the damned #GamerGate scandal spread like wildfire and woke everyone up. They had us fooled until that. Gaming had a new hipster gaming scene. Cool, independent creators and their friends in high places were finding success, getting arrogant, and giving each other awards and blowjobs on the side. They got caught with their pants down, almost literally, and they’ve been on a rampage ever since.
[I drew this back in 2014 when #GamerGate was barely starting to make waves beyond the gaming industry. Oh if we had only known how far the consequences were going to be.]
What’s the new option? Total naked power struggle, with only the barest of barebones ideology to mask the truth. We’re not fighting against “Social Justice Warriors” or even “Cultural Marxists” anymore. We’re fighting the social engineering class itself. The entire breed of sociopath power mongers in the system. In all fields and all industries, they have recognized us as a threat, and we now recognize them. They come in all colors and creeds, but their interests have converged. In some ways it’s not even a conspiracy, it’s just a game of survival. They give platforms and permissions to the “SJWs” — or if you prefer, the neofeminist, neoliberal, neomarxist, postmodernist, Antifa, etc. — idiots so we think it’s a war of Left vs. Right, but they couldn’t care less about ideologies of socialism and equality. They believe only in power.
No medium is too obscure to be safe. No online personality is too big or too small to censor. No financial flops are too big to stop pushing the new agenda. They will begrudgingly sacrifice billions in order to maintain the hegemony which makes them billions in the first place. They will immolate themselves if it means they can burn you to the ground. They will toss around vast smear campaigns just to prop up fleeting narratives, and use failed narratives as the basis for new ones. And yes, they know you don’t believe a damn thing they say anymore. You’re not supposed to believe them. You’re not supposed to vote for them. They don’t want your support: they want nothing except for you to be irrelevant. That is why they are pandering more than ever to minorities and the “oppressed”, hoping desperately that they are stupid enough to play along. (They are very racist and sexist, and yes, they believe minorities are that stupid.) You, me, and our combined spending power have become very expendable to them; they will gladly write us off on their taxes.
Astroturfing
As of publishing this article, the tabletop world is being infiltrated and subverted by these same forces. (We’ll talk about the comics industry in another article.) You may not realize it, but there is a moderate, steady astroturfing campaign taking place to trick online communities (and businesses themselves) into believing there has been a generational shift in tastes, away from the traditional hardcore audience towards a new progressive crowd that hates patriarchy and all that yucky old-fashioned stuff. These shills and gaslighting frauds routinely mock and belittle those who’ve been around the scene for decades, rewriting history to spin all sorts of bullshit tales. We’ve talked about some of these before, but I’ve seen it get worse since then. When you call them out, they swarm to each other’s defense, like somebody hit a Code Red button on their desk. “Dungeons & Dragons has always been brimming with diversity and progressive liberal views! You’re crazy for thinking that there’s an agenda to change the culture!” one of them will say, while their co-worker is busy saying the opposite: “Tabletop RPGs have always been full of racists and you’re just mad that times have changed!” If you ever get the chance to expose these people, I recommend it for the entertainment value alone.
Astroturfing is an old tactic where a government or corporation displays artificial support for a program or product, literally paying and planting actors in crowds to promote their agendas. These are often the most “vocal” supporters. Their job is to trick others into believing tha something is popular. Reverse-astroturfing is also common these days, with paid actors pretending to be “Alt-Right” protesters and other undesirables that need to be more publicly demonized for political purposes. Major political campaigns almost always hire dozens if not hundreds of people to simply fill seats and applaud talking points so it looks good on camera and reporters can report on a packed house.
At the same time, deplatforming has become the default response to “problematic” thinkers. Throttle their posts from being seen by anyone. Shadow ban them so they suddenly believe they’re losing support despite the opposite being true. De-monetize and hide content selectively. Algorithms that make “oopsies” constantly, but only in one direction. The war on “fake news” and “fake reality” has spilled into the streets and spread like a bacteria, and it’s not supposed to be subtle. They are making it obvious for us now. We’re supposed to get the point.
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Thought Police
Not billions, but trillions of dollars are riding on the success of the globalism, if that’s what you want to call it. There is no bigger ambition in the world. It is the endgame of endgames. The goal is to destroy all human rights through the creation of a collectivist society ruled by the oligarch class and managed by their social engineers. As the eternally relevant Network movie scene explains, it’s not about Karl Marx or other hopeless ideologies: it’s about pure control under whatever guise it must take. This was also the central plot of Orwell’s 1984, where language itself was controlled by a power so bent on controlling the population that they refused to even allow them words to express thoughts. Thought Police, Culture Police, Language Control, Meme Control. These are rusty old systems with new plastic faces.
And then Kanye West called it out.
What we’re seeing today is a new level of desperation in the face of utter failure by the social engineers. We’re at the point where “Incels” (“involuntary celibates”, an obscure insult for virgins) are now being openly demonized by the media as dangerous psychopaths. The facade has crumbled away. The illusion has vanished. Criminalization of simply being a loser is the next step. Perhaps a eugenics program after that. We are talking about the same families and organizations that invented eugenics to kill off problematic people in the name of science in the first place. They will make life impossible for you. They know that male suicide is going up at a rapid rate, and they want it higher. They enjoy what’s happening in Britain and Japan, with effeminate “grass eating” males who are defeated before they are even born. We’re no longer dealing with random, mysterious forces pulling culture in unpleasant directions: they are coming at us with knives out. This is why trust in the media is at an all-time low. Only 6% of people actually believe what mainstream news organizations tell us. Donald Trump’s approval ratings are at 49% as of mid-2018, a year and a half after he won the US Presidential election that sparked the biggest lunatic conspiracy theory in modern history. They’re done trying to fool us anymore, they only want to hurt us until we stop suffocating them.
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Critical Theory
I want to wrap up this particular article by teaching you about a very important strategy called Critical Theory. It’s not a belief system, but a weapon. You can do your own research on it wherever you want (here‘s a fairly neutral example) but what you won’t easily find is how it’s being used in practice today.
The key to Critical Theory is that it doesn’t offer you an answer. It only provides targets to destroy. It is a method by which to convert any and all pillars of traditional society into demonized enemies of “progress”. Weaponized language like patriarchy, white privilege, hetero-cis-normative, homophobic, islamophobic, transphobic (basically any social “phobia”) and others have been the work of Critical Theory practitioners. They love language manipulation. If they can get people to use and therefore validate their terminology, they can trick everyone into thinking about the issues they care about.
But again: they don’t give you anything to attack in return. They aren’t promoting a belief, they are simply “criticizing” problems in society (hence, Critical Theory). They define the problem, and then people in power are expected to do something about it. That’s how an open society and a democracy is supposed to work right? (Snicker!) They will never tell you how much they want slavery and the Dark Ages to return to their full glory, but they will constantly tell you that believing we are free people made in the image of God and given inalienable rights like freedom of speech (toxic!) and gun ownership are “problematic”. See the pattern?
Maybe I’ll just leave this here.
Rights Are Your Enemy
Let’s take a look at some of the talking points floated by the Critical Theory-wielding social engineers in recent years. This is one of my favorite compilations, found on Twitter by @nerkish, claiming that American’s basic national rights are problematic. Freedom of speech and the right to bear arms are rooted in — gasp! — colonial Revolution days when European settlers were in charge!
ALL THE AMENDMENTS WE HATE ARE WHITE! pic.twitter.com/bpQllQWR9E
— NERKISH (@nerkish) May 23, 2018
I’m always glad when people point out such blatant anti-human, anti-rights rhetoric. It reminds us how regressive the establishment is trying to get. But for me the fascination goes deeper. You can make fun of the Washington Post or their various columnists if you want, but these talking points are not dreamt up by the publications who write them. The ideas and the instruction to push them to the population come from other places. Thinktanks. Lobbyist groups, special interests, foreign investors, international bankers, Wall Street traders, ruling class families like the Bushes. Guys like George Soros and John Podesta. When you see a slew of similar ideas trickle out into the mainstream media which would have been considered utterly laughable just a few years ago without alarm bells ringing from competitors — who could easily mock them and score points with their own readership — what does that tell you?
Even if we ignore the outright militarization of the media over the decades by the Bush/Obama administrations, who made sure that it was no longer a crime for the CIA and military to directly dictate what could be said in the mainstream news if they wanted to, there is still the stench of conspiracy all around it. Pointing to the usual suspects of metropolitan urbanite academics and clueless progressives isn’t nearly enough. There are checks and balances to keep those people from getting published in mainstream news. The reality is that the narrative comes from a much higher place, and suddenly these voices are given a push.
You know whose voices don’t get a push, but instead get silenced? Well, we’ve already covered that.