1984: Thread

Sun Mar 12 17:25:34 PDT 2023

Locked-Away In 'Conspiracy Theorist' Camps: The Orwellian Dystopia Of
The "Censorship-Industrial-Complex"

https://consentfactory.org/2023/03/10/the-censorship-industrial-complex/
https://consentfactory.org/2023/01/11/the-mother-of-all-limited-hangouts/

Authored by CJ Hopkins via ConsentFactory.org,

https://swprs.org/studies-on-covid-19-lethality/
https://consentfactory.org/2018/01/26/the-war-on-dissent/
https://consentfactory.org/2021/05/03/the-criminalization-of-dissent/
https://consentfactory.org/2017/11/03/whos-afraid-of-corporate-cointelpro/
https://consentfactory.org/2021/06/29/the-war-on-reality/
https://consentfactory.org/2021/06/20/manufacturing-new-normal-reality/
https://consentfactory.org/2018/12/03/manufacturing-truth/
https://consentfactory.org/2016/12/07/manufacturing-normality/
https://consentfactory.org/2022/11/13/the-road-to-totalitarianism-revisited/
https://consentfactory.org/2022/10/16/the-gaslighting-of-the-masses/
https://www.racket.news/p/my-statement-to-congress
https://www.racket.news/p/meet-the-censored-cj-hopkins-critic
https://consentfactory.org/2022/11/27/the-emperor-elonicus/
https://consentfactory.org/2023/01/11/the-mother-of-all-limited-hangouts/
https://twitter.com/CJHopkins_Z23/status/1630566574540070912
https://consentfactory.org/2021/11/22/pathologized-totalitarianism-101/
https://consentfactory.org/2022/05/09/the-rise-of-the-new-normal-reich/

I think something is seriously wrong with my brain. Yesterday, I
hallucinated that Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified
before a subcommittee of the US House of Representatives about the
Censorship Industrial Complex, i.e., the US arm of the global official
propaganda and disinformation apparatus that has been waging an
all-out war on dissent for the better part of the last six years.

I know this couldn’t have actually happened, and was just an extended
hallucination (probably the result of the copious amount of drugs I
consumed in my misspent youth, or the effects of a Commie bio-weapon
with a fatality rate of less than one percent, because I’ve been
writing about The War on Dissent (2018), and The Criminalization of
Dissent (2021), and the global Corporate COINTELPRO op (2017), and The
War on Reality (2021), and The Manufacturing of Reality (2021), and
Manufacturing Truth (2018), and Manufacturing Normality (2016), and
The Road to Totalitarianism (2022), and The Gaslighting of the Masses
(2022) … well, for quite some time. So, I’m sure it was just an
hallucination, because there’s no way Matt and Shellenberger were
actually sitting there talking about how …

    “We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies
developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from
every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global
Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency
scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing
the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard,
the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.”

    (Matt Taibbi’s Statement to Congress)

… and documenting the coordinated censorship of sources that
interfered with certain official narratives, like “Russiagate” and
“The Apocalpytic Virus” …

… because that’s just a crazy “conspiracy theory.”

I am also sure I was hallucinating yesterday, because, right in the
middle of my hallucination, right around the time that Stacey Plaskett
started squawking like a demon pterodactyl, I had another
hallucination, like my hallucinating self was hallucinating, which was
like being in a Christopher Nolan film. In this one, Matt asked me to
talk about how I was being censored by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et
al., and their governmental and NGO partners in 2021, and I started
babbling all this “conspiracy theory” stuff about the very
“Censorship-Industrial-Complex” that Matt and Shellenberger were
testifying about in the hallucination I appeared to be hallucinating
the other hallucination in.

And then my hallucination got weird.

Now, it’s been quite a while since I’ve indulged in any seriously
mind-bending drugs, but this reminded me of a bad LSD trip, like when
Satan starts talking to you through the TV. There I was, happily
hallucinating these two distinguished independent journalists who had
done all this historic reporting on a story of extreme importance and
had been invited to Congress to talk about it, and, suddenly, it all
went dark and twisted.

Stacey Plaskett, the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary
subcommittee started badgering, insulting, smearing, and baiting Matt
and Shellenberger like Joe McCarthy in drag. Trembling with hatred,
she accused them of being members of some sort of Substack-based death
squad that “poses a direct threat to people who oppose them,” and of
stochastically terrorizing Yoel Roth, the former Twitter Censorship
Czar, and of unleashing “homophobia and anti-Semitism” on him. Then
she launched into a spittle-flecked rant about “January 6” and
“threatening our democracy,” until she was restrained by James Jordan,
the Subcommittee Chairman. And this was just during her opening
remarks.

The other Democrats soon joined in the bullying, and lying, and
smearing, and sneering, and generally acting like prosecutors at some
hate-drunk witch trial. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who, for whatever
reasons, is still allowed to serve in Congress after being forced to
resign as the DNC Chair for rigging the 2016 election, staged a whole
dog-and-pony show with blow-up photos of Joe Rogan and so on. Sylvia
Garcia, who appeared to be drunk, demanded that Matt reveal his
source, and then, when he refused, repeatedly tried to weasel it out
of him with all the deftness of a one-legged idiot in an ass-kicking
contest. Colin Allred put on a PowerPoint show involving Kanye West’s
anti-Semitic tweets, random bigots on Twitter, and the Russian agents
who conspired against him (i.e., Allred) personally, and then lectured
Matt about the “threats to our democracy” and called him a “conspiracy
theorist.” Stephen Lynch went full-McCarthy, demanding that the
witnesses affirm they “believe that Russians interfered in the 2016
election.”

And so on. I told you things got twisted. Thank God it was just an
hallucination and not a live, televised demonstration of precisely
what I have been trying to describe the emergence of for the last six
years, which is a new totalitarian form of global capitalism that no
longer needs to maintain the pretense of upholding (or respecting) our
“democratic rights,” because it has no external adversaries, and thus
is free to morph into a quasi-Orwellian dystopia where any and all
forms of dissent from official ideology can (and must) be
delegitimized as “disinformation,” “misinformation, and even
“malinformation,” and corporate-owned political puppets feel no
compunction whatsoever about behaving like vicious little fascists on
television because they know they have the fearsome power of the
global-capitalist machine behind them, no matter how openly (and
badly) they lie, and that their fanatical followers will parrot any
propaganda they are given to parrot, no matter how patently false or
absurd, and will spew their mindless hatred at whomever they are
ordered to spew it at, and otherwise act like a bunch of fascists.

Anyway, thank God that was just a bad flashback, or a minor cerebral
infarction, or whatever, because, if it wasn’t … what a total bummer!

OK, seriously now, I assume that some of my regular readers might be
confused by this essay. After all, I have been rather critical of Elon
Musk and his handling of the “Twitter Files.” And now, here I am,
celebrating Matt and Shellenberger’s testimony yesterday. Did I not
call the Twitter Files a limited hangout? Yes, I did. And I will do it
again. But not today. Today I will celebrate. I will raise a glass to
Matt and Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, and the other Twitter
Files journalists. I will even raise a glass to Elon Musk (who
continues to maliciously defame and censor me and others like me with
fake “content warnings” and other such slimy censorship tactics) for
making the Twitter Files available to them.

If that baffles you … well, let me tell you a secret.

The way this little ecosystem works is, writers like me don’t get to
testify on television before subcommittees. Actual journalists get to
do that. Actual journalists who are “normal” enough. Actual
journalists like Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Glenn
Greenwald, et al. You know who I’m talking about. Actual journalists
who know where the lines are, who aren’t going to start babbling about
“Pathologized Totalitarianism” and “The New Normal Reich” on national
television. What writers like me do get to do (and what it is our job
to do) is subtly influence, gently pressure, and pester the living
hell out of actual journalists who still have a shred of integrity
left by saying the things they cannot say, or saying them in a way
that they cannot say them, until the time comes when they can almost
say them, because we have said them over and over again, and more or
less everyone can see them, so it is finally safe to say them, almost.

OK, sure, it doesn’t pay all that much, but it’s fun, and I tend to
sleep fairly well.

So, don’t worry, I’ll get back to doing that shortly. The
“Censorship-Industrial-Complex” is a much bigger story than just the
US division. I’ll be prodding Matt and the other Twitter Files
journalists to prod Elon Musk to bring in international journalists to
cover the same story in countries like Germany, the UK, Australia,
Canada, France, Italy, The Netherlands, and so on. Feel free to join
in the fun.

Who knows? In another four or five years, we might even find out how
this photo simultaneously appeared in every paper of record on the
planet in January of 2020... that is, if we’re not all locked away in
“conspiracy theorist” camps by then.

In the meantime, kudos to the Twitter Files Team!