I started to write about the precedents for the Trump indictment and related topics in the recent criminalization of political disagreement, but I couldn’t summon up the energy to keep going. I was boring myself, and I kept stopping. It took a couple of days, but I figured it out: I realized that I was treating a pseudo-event as an event.
The thing that finally got me over the cognitive hump was Jacob Siegel’s massive article on the disinformation hoax, which you have no choice but to read. I printed it out and read it on paper, and I suggest you do the same. He’s describing, in depth and with considerable precision, an information technocracy organized around a principle now taken as a given by the governing class: “You cannot be trusted with your own mind.” There’s much more to say about it, but I’m mostly not going to say it. Siegel said it, and you should go see what he said. It’s important, and will show up in political discussions for a long time.
However. The development of this enormous manipulative apparatus, policing your perceptions and putatively guardrailing where your mind can go, cannot succeed. It treats bytes as trees; it treats information, or pieces of pseudo-information, as reality, and presumes that your perception can be shaped. It presumes that Twitter can become real, that repetition coupled with repression of the counterclaim can make you think X is Not-X. It can’t. The Federal Center for Lake Perception, working in conjunction with an endless variety of lake-centered NGOs and lake-describing academic researchers, tells you your house sits next to a lake. You look outside and don’t see a lake. The end. Hundreds of paid influencers can tell you that a lump of shit is filet mignon, and social media companies can suspend the accounts of users who say that the shit is shit, but then you take a bite.
That which is, is. Its isness is ineradicable. You’re a person in the world; you can see what is and what isn’t, and you mostly can’t not see, even if you try to make your mind comply. Starving person reads wall poster declaring resounding success of annual crops due to Great Leap Forward, dies of hunger.
Alex Berenson said on Twitter that the mRNA injections don’t prevent transmission or infection, so his account was cancelled and he was denounced for disinformation, so now you know that the injections do prevent transmission and infection. Right? Mind control. Very effective. Your brain just slides right in between those guardrails, doesn’t it, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
So: Read the Trump indictment:
It pretends to describe 34 felonies, a large number of very serious crimes. It doesn’t. You know that it doesn’t. You can’t be made to not know that. It’s sub-chickenshit make-believe, pretend-shaped into the form of serious allegations, and it exists to be consumed as a headline. It’s a pseudo-event prosecution, designed to plant an informational seed rather than to succeed in court.
Every day we wake up to plates of shit, and the declaration that the shit is news that has important things to tell us. It’s shit. The shit is shit. See also. And this.
What scares me is the folks who can't see that it's bullshit, no matter how absurd it gets. Another example:
White House Releases 11-Page Review of Biden Botched Afghanistan Withdrawal, Blaming Trump for Biden’s Bad Decisions
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/04/06/white-house-releases-11-page-review-of-biden-botched-afghanistan-withdrawal-blaming-trump-for-bidens-bad-decisions/
This is the bit from Orwell, about how the PTB can't persist in obscuring the truth "in ways that would impair military efficiency," if I remember the phrase right. We all know people who have died suddenly or become very ill after the corona shots, and for most of us, everyone or nearly everyone who has gotten the shots has caught corona at least once. We know that Trump was skanky with respect to women and unscrupulous when it came to eminent domain and real estate projects, but not a felon. We know that a boy is a boy, and that a teen boy can generally run faster than a teen girl. We know that our Edison lightbulbs (taken away from us lo these many years) aren't responsible for a snowstorm in Buffalo or a hurricane in Florida. (And whatever happened to the hole in the ozone layer? It was all the rage when I was 12.)
Unfortunately, the other thing we know is that people who profit from selling carbon credits and mRNA injections have pervaded the administrative state. I don't know what these people get out of persecuting Trump, but I'm sure it's something. Maybe it's distracting people from other potential presidents; maybe it's just reminding us that the tax code is a weapon that is always ready to be used.
I don't read the crap, and I don't follow the circus, but I am disheartened at the power the bad guys have. At least Trump can afford good legal representation. I wonder how much of the administrative state Bobby, Jr., would replace if he won. He seems unafraid of the bullies, and frankly, I'd like to keep DeSantis here. DeSantis also may not be cynical enough to strike at the root of the problem.